


the more beautiful everything is (the more it’ll hurt without you)

by barbiewrites



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Call Me By Your Name AU, Charles You Slut, Erik Lehnsherr Loves Charles Xavier, Franz Kafka References, Gay and Mutant in the 1980s, Inspired by Call Me By Your Name, Kinda, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Medium Burn, Mutant Pride, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Telepathy, Underage Charles Xavier, Walt Whitman References, like. so many of them, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:00:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21883387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barbiewrites/pseuds/barbiewrites
Summary: in the summer of 1983, charles and erik meet.a call me by your name au
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 79





	the more beautiful everything is (the more it’ll hurt without you)

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the mythology of dance by harry eiss. 
> 
> i wanted to hit 100k words on here in 2 years, and here i am exactly on the day, publishing something 5x as long as i had intended it to be. oops! 
> 
> there's a lot of talk about literature in here, so hopefully it isn't too confusing. i tried to point out where the whitman/kafka quotes were, but there are quite a lot still. this is also my first time writing them so i hope it's alright!

“-- And make sure your room is cleared for your father’s guest!” His mother calls after him. 

“Yes, mother!” Charles yells back as he ascends the stairs, though he mutters under his breath after, “Ridiculous.”

Raven giggles at his response, following him into his room and making herself at home on his bed as he fusses about, pulling things from shelves and drawers to move into the opposite room. “You know,” she says helpfully, “you really only have yourself to blame.”

“I only have myself to blame?” Charles balks, dropping a book onto his stack of clothes. “And how, pray tell, do you figure that?”

“Well, you could have taken a room downstairs,” she points out, and Charles shakes his head. 

“It’s  _ my _ room,” he responds. “And besides, it’s far too drafty down there. I’m not going to live like it’s winter in June. Father could have picked any other room for him to have in this wing.”

“Oh, the rooms all filled with your science stuff?” Raven asks. 

Charles fixes her with a flat look. “It’s father’s, too,” he points out. “Apologies that not all of us can be prodigies.”

If there was any way to get under Raven’s skin, it was to point out that her younger brother was taking the same level of college courses as she was. It wasn’t that she was sensitive about it, she knew she had her own strengths, some of which lay where Charles was less experienced, just as was true of the opposite -- but it grew old after every member of their family treated her like she didn’t know left from right simply because Charles was smarter than his age suggested. 

From Charles, though, she brushes the comment aside like water off a duck’s back. “The same way that not all of us can have social lives,” she nods as if agreeing with him in a heartfelt manner. 

Charles fixes her with another flat look, then picks up his stack of belongings and totes them through the bathroom, into his bedroom for the next few weeks. He comes back through the bathroom and sets upon selecting items to bring from his bookshelf. “I hardly think existing in a love triangle is the golden standard of a social life,” he points out.

“How would you know?” She asks, walking up beside him to look at the aged spines organized meticulously before them.

Charles raises his eyebrows, “Well, maybe if you’d stop stringing Hank along, I could --” 

“Hank is an adult,” Raven points out as she cuts him off. “He can stop being strung along whenever he chooses and -- he’s not even being strung along, Charles. You wouldn’t know.” 

Charles simply shrugs and hands her a pair of thick books. “It’s what it looks like,” he answers simply. 

“You know,” she points out, “you could totally _ learn  _ about dating someone this summer.” 

Her brother fixes her with a scowl, then stacks another book in her arms. “Seems awfully unnecessary,” he responds easily. 

Raven doesn’t hide her disappointment with his answer, huffing as she leans back against the bookshelf and resigns herself to being a pack-mule for Charles’ books. “Charles, come on,” she whines. “You’re good looking and personable and you’re good at talking to people. All you have to do is try. I mean, you already have girls trying to get your attention. Just pick one and go with it.” 

“Just pick one and go with it?” He asks with a chuckle. “Is that how you found yourself between Hank and Azazel?”

“Very funny,” Raven replies dryly. “I mean it, though. That Moira girl? She’s back for the summer.” 

“Moira and I aren’t like that,” Charles protests, his eyebrows knitting together lightly. 

“But you could be,” she points out. 

“Raven,” he sighs, taking a pair of books and leading Raven back through the bathroom to stack them on the desk. “I have a very full schedule,” he protests. 

“I know, I know, you’re an incredibly gifted and well-rounded individual. Just promise me you’ll try to get out a little this summer,” she encourages. “It’s your last summer as a real teenager,” she attempts, ignoring the scoff she gets from Charles, “so just… you know, try something. Don’t waste it away in your lab again, you spend enough time hunched over a microscope during the school year.”

“I’ll still be a teenager next summer,” he points out unhelpfully. 

“Oh my God,” she groans, “just be a little irresponsible and unpredictable. For me?”

She fixes her best doe eyes on him and he huffs in resignation. “If I say yes, will you drop it?” He asks fatalistically. 

“You’re going to have fun this summer,” Raven tells him resolutely. 

He couldn’t exactly blame her for wanting to force him to get out. Being gifted as a student was oftentimes a blessing and a curse. He loved learning and the pursuit of knowledge and all the things that came with it, but even he had to admit he could let it get out of hand sometimes. Reading until sunrise without noticing, spending tireless hours in the lab without protest, discussing the intricacies of genetic mutation and evolution with others until his throat felt raw. The downside, of course, was that it didn’t exactly suit his social life. He was always intruding on a space meant for people older than him. 

Of course, Charles found ways to look on the bright side when possible. His manners were impeccable and he didn’t at all have a problem speaking competently with people at all. Rather, he found trouble when it came to making good friends. Even Hank, who he would call his closest friend, was Raven’s age. He couldn’t go out to bars with them and no one wanted a 17-year-old wandering around at their house parties. He knew it was only common sense that they wanted to keep themselves out of trouble, but being excluded simply meant he spent more time in the lab or cooped up in his room reading. 

As for people his own age, he found them somewhat hard to relate to. Moira, for example, was one of his only friends who were his own age. She was poised, mature, and ambitious, and even if she didn’t always understand what he was saying, she always let him rattle on and tried to keep up. She had a few friends of her own that Charles would occasionally hang out around, but oftentimes he found their conversations utterly immature. They were concerned about sex and who had a crush on who and, forgive him for being so cynical, he found it simply gratuitous. 

And he knew how much of a hypocrite he sounded like, given that Raven fretted over the same things and was five years older than them. He reckoned that he could only tolerate her droning about boys because she was his sister. 

He feels a pique of interest from his parents’ minds, then the familiar twinge of excitement from his father. 

“I think he’s here,” Charles tells his sister, hurrying out of his bedroom and across the hall. Raven stayed close on his heels as they walked into the library and peered out the window. 

Both of them pushed stopped at the window overlooking the front yard, watching a sleek black car roll towards them.

“What’s he like?” Raven asks him. 

“How am I to know?” Charles asks back, glancing over at her. 

Raven lifts a pair of fingers to her temple and whistles. 

“Completely inappropriate,” Charles chides. Raven scoffs back at him. “He’s a complete stranger, I’m not just going to dig through his mind before I’ve even introduced myself.”

“Dad said he’s a huge ethics guy,” Raven replies, ignoring his own response. 

They watch as said guy climbs out from his car. He’d obviously dressed for the occasion, with neatly pleated tan pants and a tight black turtleneck. Charles can see the glint of a gold necklace, delicate around his neck. His hair is brassy and neatly styled and Charles can’t see all too much of his face, but he can see enough to know that he’s handsome. 

“Come on,” Charles encourages, heading back out of the room towards the stairs. Better to introduce themselves than stand around listening to their parents’ muffled voices through stone walls. 

“-- you’ll have to excuse the help, there’s a lot of coming and going, but it’s all through the south wing. We’re getting new pipes and floors put in after a leak, but the north wing is completely yours to roam,” his mother’s voice explains to the man as Charles leads Raven out onto the front steps. “Ah!” She smiles, “Erik, these are our kids. Charles and Raven.”

“Nice to meet you,” Erik nods politely while extending a hand. 

“Pleasures all mine,” he promises as he shakes Erik’s hand.

“That’s a good handshake,” Erik compliments before moving to shake Raven’s hand with a quiet “hi.” 

Up close now, Charles can see he was right about Erik being attractive. He has an angular face with high cheekbones and particularly striking eyes, thin lips but a wide, kind smile as he thanks Charles’ father for having him. The delicate chain Charles had spotted around his neck is a thin gold chain that holds the charm of the Star of David. 

“I’m sure you’re tired,” his mother continues, “Charles, dear, show Erik to his room, help him with his things.” 

“Oh, this is all of it,” Erik promises her. “I’m a light traveler. I don’t need much.” 

“It’ll do you some good to rest before dinner,” she insists, and Charles gives him a polite smile. 

“So, this is your room I’m staying in?” Erik asks while Charles leads him up the stairs.

“My father thought you’d be most comfortable here,” Charles explains. He didn’t know why on earth his father thought that the most suitable place for his grad student to live was in his 17-year-old son’s bedroom but he’d been uninterested in explaining his reasoning further, so Charles simply had to make do. 

Erik lets out a sigh of relief as he steps into the room, dropping his bags by the foot of the bed. Charles stands to the side while Erik looks around the room. He lingers on some of the books on the shelf, then continues around and regards the framed diploma and other awards hanging around. 

“Dr. Xavier said you were smart but I hardly expected this,” Erik admits with a dry chuckle. 

Charles feels his face flush at the compliment. He’s been complimented before about his mind, obviously, but something about the fact that it’s coming from Erik makes him squirm a little. Charles can’t help the slip of his mind into Erik’s, just the barest touch. 

It’s enough to hit him with a wave of emotions. Exhaustion, surely, from Erik’s long day of travel from New York, and then amusement and a sense of attraction, interest, and an authentic but muted feeling of fascination. Charles has felt a great many minds, very few on purpose, and none had ever touched Charles as Erik’s did. 

Looking into Erik’s mind was a curse in some ways. Now that he’d had a taste, he wanted nothing more than to explore it in its deepest intricacies. If just a touch at surface level had Charles feeling so intensely he could only imagine what it was like to feel his mind completely. 

“Thank you, Erik,” Charles responds while shaking his head. His words come a beat too late, just enough to show he’d been caught in thought by such a compliment. “That’s quite flattering, coming from… such an accomplished scholar like yourself,” he wants to slap himself for sounding so immature, but his mind is still reeling from Erik’s impact on him. 

Erik looks at him with amusement from the other side of the room. His hands are clasped neatly behind his back and Charles is suddenly struck with just how broad his shoulders are. 

“I’m, um. I’ve left some towels in the bathroom for you,” Charles continues dumbly when Erik doesn’t respond. “And I’m just in the next room over, if you need anything at all, or you can call for a maid, but,” Charles gives a breathy laugh. “I’ll leave you to rest, then.” 

He turns to leave through their connecting bathroom when Erik’s voice follows him. “Thank you, Charles,” he says. 

Charles turns back to Erik’s incredibly watchful gaze and despite being the only other one in the room, feels as though he’s standing in the middle of the Royal Opera House stage with a full audience before him. He gives Erik a smile and hurries into his new room, shutting the door lightly behind him. 

He feels as though he needs an incredibly cold shower or possibly to masturbate or maybe to go on a several mile long run. 

Instead, Charles sits at his desk and tries to read. He’s usually quite good at distracting himself with the complexities of RNA transcription but he finds himself utterly distracted with thoughts of Erik. It only takes him an hour, alternatively measured with re-reading the same few pages nine times after coming to the end of the chapter and realizing he hadn’t comprehended a single word. 

He finds Raven with their parents downstairs, luckily speaking about the neighbors and not the ridiculously attractive grad student currently in his bed. The mindless gossip, at least, keeps his mind marginally busier than the biology had. 

“Charles, would you mind telling Erik that dinner is ready?” His mother asks after Anne has come in to gather them. 

At his door, Charles knocks lightly three times before letting himself in. Erik is face-down on his duvet, evidently too tired to even put himself beneath the duvet before losing consciousness. 

“Erik,” Charles says quietly. Erik’s chest rises and falls evenly still. “Erik,” he repeats a little louder, and still he gets no response. “Erik,” Charles speaks as though he’s addressing a group in a noisy room and even so, Erik sleeps ever peacefully before him. Charles sighs through his nose and glances down the hall to ensure none of the help is lingering. He looks back to Erik and raises two fingers to his temple, giving Erik’s mind the gentlest nudge to rouse him. 

“Charles,” Erik says blearily. Charles runs a hand through his hair to play off any suspicions about why he’d touch his temple, though with how Erik is blinking at him he’s sure the man didn’t notice the gesture at all. He knows it’s foolish to think people might notice his abilities with such a subtle gesture but the anxiety of someone becoming angry with him is too strong for him not to attempt to obscure it at the barest minimum. 

“Dinner is ready downstairs,” Charles tells him politely. 

Erik makes a throaty noise, rubbing at his eyes. “I’m not hungry, but thank you, Charles,” he says, rolling onto his back and draping an arm over his eyes. 

“Apologies for waking you, then,” comes his response, but he thinks Erik is already asleep. 

“That’s kind of rude,” Raven comments when Charles tells his family that Erik won’t be joining them. 

“Raven,” his father chides, and Raven shakes her head as she sips at her wine. “He’s just flown in from New York, I’m sure he’s exhausted.” 

“Still,” she shrugs. 

“Some things,” he tells her simply, “can’t be helped.” Charles watches as he fixes her with a pointed look. “Isn’t that right, Charles?” 

He’s not sure why his father is targeting him at the moment, but he mindlessly agrees. 

“Erik has about two months of dinner with us in the future, I’m sure we can all find it in us to forgive this one time,” he points out, and Charles shifts at the reminder of just how long Erik is going to be around for. He certainly hopes that he can get the distraction thing under control or he won’t be getting any work done. 

Charles figures that it’s simply the interest of someone new. Erik is simply a distraction because he has just arrived and Charles is curious to know him, not because he is of any greater importance than that. It has nothing to do with the width of his shoulders or his piercing gaze or how greatly just an accidental touch of his mind affected Charles. It will fade with time, Charles is positive. 

Erik doesn’t join them and sleeps straight through the night. Charles doesn’t see him again until the next morning. 

He’s doing some light reading, perched in the window of his new room. His mother hates it when he sits like this, always terrified he’ll fall from the second story and break his neck. 

The allure of it all is too sweet to deny, though. There’s plenty of natural light, a breeze, and sitting on the edge makes him feel a little daring. Raven says he does it just for the aesthetic, and Charles can’t deny that it’s all very pretty.

This morning is pleasure reading. He’s just started Gore Vidal’s The City and The Pillar and with the pages lightly in his fingers, something draws his gaze out the window to the grounds of his home. He knows the view in the early morning is spectacular, with the back yard foggy and half-obscured while morning light stays barely hidden by a dusting of clouds. Their rosebushes are looking fruitful as well as the bunches of tulips, and his mother ought to complement their gardener with how lush everything is looking. 

Out from the edge of the treeline, Charles realizes what had pulled his attention from his novel. There’s a man running casually towards the house and as he draws closer, Charles realizes that it’s Erik. He’s wearing a heathered pair of grey sweatpants and is quite distractingly without a shirt at all. He knows it’s inappropriate to stare -- barring the fact that he’s staring at the incredibly chiseled body of another man -- but he shouldn’t be staring at anyone in any state of undress, much less when they don’t know he’s looking. Despite knowing better, Charles can’t pull his eyes away as Erik slows to a halt just before Charles’ window and turns to face the backyard. He lifts his arms up, pulling gently on his elbows to stretch and then doing the same with his legs. 

And then all of the sudden, like Charles had called his name, Erik turns around and looks up at him. Charles feels a little like a deer caught in the headlights, mouth slack and cheeks flaming because he’s been caught. Erik doesn’t move, he simply brushes his palms against one another and watches him back. He must have known Charles was watching for the past few minutes and such an idea makes Charles feel a little queasy despite Erik not seeming upset at Charles watching him. In fact, if Charles can feel anything beyond his own embarrassment, he can feel a sense of pride coming from Erik. 

Just as quickly as he’d been caught, Erik’s gaze is dropping and he’s heading inside. Just a few minutes later he hears the shower between their rooms turn on and he can’t help but let out a breath, feeling once more like he might need to jerk off or go on a run himself. 

Erik finally makes his debut that morning at breakfast. Charles can’t help but look at him, of course, but he’s studying him. He so desperately wants to know what’s going on in Erik’s head, what he had been thinking yesterday as he studied the things in Charles’ room and today when he’d caught him spying. 

The oddest thing, though, is that Erik hardly seems affected by it. He makes polite conversation about Oxford and compliments the yard that he’d explored on his morning run (Charles’ heart crawls into his throat at just the mention of it, terrified Erik might choose now to bring it up), on the weather and how delicious breakfast is. If anything, Erik is sending him knowing looks every time Charles stares for too long, like Erik himself is hyper-aware of Charle’s gaze. The first time Charles gets caught staring, he chokes on his plum juice. 

“Maybe if you’d like to take a look at the city, Erik, Raven could show you around,” his father suggests. 

“Oh,” Raven says, drawing out the syllable. “I -- I have plans today, I can’t,” she shakes her head gently. “Sorry. I’m sure Charles,” she turns to look at her brother like she’s had a fantastic idea, “Charles would love to take you around, right? You don’t have anything going on.” 

Charles smiles at her in a way that he hopes tells her to sleep with one eye open tonight. 

“That’s a great idea,” his mother agrees. “Charles, you don’t mind, do you?”

Charles fixes a polite smile onto his lips and looks at his mother, avoiding Erik altogether. “Of course,” he nods. “I’d be happy to.”

He’s going to wring Raven’s pretty little neck, he’s sure of that much. 

“I’ll be ready after breakfast if that’s alright with you?” Erik asks him across the table. 

Charles gives him a nod. His father starts going on about how they can take the Vespas down into town or maybe if Erik fancied a bike ride, they could make use of the bikes out in the shed. “Charles is a good tour guide,” his father promises. “He’ll take care of you.” 

Erik gives him a smug smile across the table, one that makes Charles hot beneath his collar. 

They do end up taking the Vespas down, riding them into town before parking them outside a coffee shop Charles quite likes so that Erik can get another Americano and Charles can get a cup of earl grey. 

“Did you know,” Charles asks him, “that the word ‘snob’ originated here in Oxford?”

Erik hums in interest. 

“It comes from the Latin phrase  _ sine nobilitate _ , or ‘without nobility’.”

“Do you speak Latin?”

Charles gives him a light shrug. “I took it in school and I’ve picked up bits and pieces just through other avenues.”

“I’m sure it’s useful in studying biology,” Erik responds. 

“Certainly,” he nods. “The word biology comes from greek, but there are plenty of words within the field of biology that originate from Latin. Mutation, in fact, is another. It comes from  _ mutatio _ , which originated from  _ mutare _ , or ‘to change’.”

“That’s your specific area of study?” 

Charles nods at him, and this time he doesn’t have to force his smile. “I think it’s just incredible how this whole world came from a series of microscopic mistakes and miscopies. You, just as an example, you have the MC1R gene for auburn hair. And your green eyes, those are a mutation, too. Some mutations have lived through thousands of years just to give us attached earlobes or not, and it’s simply how we’ll continue to live for millions of years.” 

“You’re very inspired,” Erik replies cooly, and when Charles glances up at him, he’s giving him that same knowing smile. Charles turns back to the sidewalk quickly. They’re nearly shoulder-to-shoulder now, Erik is going to see his blush from a mile away. 

“Did you know that Oxford is one degree west of the prime meridian? Which means that we’re technically five minutes behind the meantime --” 

Throughout the day, Charles finds it increasingly easy to get along with Erik. Any awkward silence he fills with random facts about mutations or biology or Oxford or anything else he can think of and when he does, Erik gives him one of those knowing smiles that Charles can’t seem to get accustomed to. They have lunch at a street cafe where Erik insists on paying and their last stop is a crowded, somewhat messy bookstore that Charles adores. 

“Have you read any Kafka?” Erik asks him, casually regarding the books stuffed along the shelves of the shop. 

“Kafka,” Charles repeats thoughtfully. “The name sounds familiar.” 

“He’s a Jewish author from Prague,” Erik continues. “He wrote  _ The Metamorphosis _ .”

“I don’t think I’ve read that one,” Charles admits. 

Erik turns where he stands, leaning back casually against the bookshelf and studying Charles’ face. “It’s quite good. Better in German, but a good read nonetheless. I’ll give you my copy when we’re back at the house.” 

“Thank you, Erik,” Charles responds, once more feeling his stomach flip under Erik’s careful eyes. “That’s very kind of you.” 

“Of course,” he nods. “It’s the least I could do.”

Dinner goes well enough with Charles’ parents quizzing Erik on all they did today and again falling into the same polite conversation. Raven relays to Charles that Hank said hello and Charles doesn’t give her the pleasure of asking what they had done together. When Charles returns to his room, an old, well-used copy of  _ The Metamorphosis _ rests on his bed.

Charles stays up for the better part of the night reading it, and after breakfast, the next morning asks Anne to bring a mug of tea up to him in the library when she has a moment. Much to his surprise, when the door opens the one holding the mug is not Anne, but Erik himself. 

“I have something for you,” he tells Charles, carrying the mug over and placing it down on the table before him. 

Charles sits up, unfolding himself from the armchair he’d fit himself into. “Thank you, Erik,” he says, sliding his bookmark between the pages to reach for his mug. “You didn’t need to do that.” 

“I was coming upstairs anyway,” he shrugs. “And I wanted to see if you had begun the book, but I see you’re already a step ahead of me.” 

A sheepish smile finds Charles’ lips. He hadn’t intended to come across as so eager, but now that Erik has him cornered like this he realizes just how credulous he seems to the older man. 

“How are you liking it?” Erik asks him kindly. 

“It’s incredibly well-written,” Charles nods. “Its prose is quite unique and there’s an incredible amount of subtext that he manages to create through this idea of the monstrous vermin --” 

“Ungeheures Ungeziefer,” Erik supplies him with, and Charles is utterly charmed by the way Erik’s accent curls around the words most suited to him. 

“The idea that all of one’s life can change because of something so…”

“Seemingly innate,” Erik offers. 

Charles nods. “Yes,” he agrees. “Intrinsic. It would be the same as if I were to wake up tomorrow and reveal I had brown eyes after all this time, or that I had six fingers or eleven toes, and to think my family might lock me away to starve.” 

Erik gives him another incredibly thoughtful look, one that seems to go deeper than his skin. As if Erik were looking at his bones or maybe even his heart and soul, and if Charles didn’t know any better he might think Erik was just as much a telepath as he was. “You’re a good reader,” Erik compliments. “There’s much more to reading than simply looking at words on a page.” 

Charles sips at his tea. “Thank you, Erik.” 

Erik looks him over once more and seems to be saying something. He tries to keep his mind to himself, not to intrude like yesterday, but he can’t get over the profuse sense that Erik is trying to tell him  _ you are like me _ .  _ I am like you _ . 

“I’ll let you finish, then,” Erik nods to the book on the table and gives him another closed-mouth smile, then exits the room. Charles is left wondering just how much of what he thinks is true. 

Charles knows his attraction to other men isn’t unlike his telepathy. It’s a part of him just as his muscles and bones and lungs are and there isn’t anything wrong with it, no matter what anyone else might have to say about it. He doesn’t know a thing about other mutants beyond his sister and her friends, but he knows well enough to keep it hidden. He’s seen how people react to Raven’s true blue form and to Hank’s feet and to the sight of Azazel, how the man has to live in such fear and isolation simply because of the way he looks. Charles is lucky to be one who doesn’t have to hide as much, that his mutation isn’t as glaringly obvious as theirs. 

As far as his attraction goes, well, he reads the news. He knows what’s going on in the States, he’s read about Stonewall and blimey, homosexual acts in the UK had only been decriminalized within his lifetime and were under such harsh rules. Nevertheless, Charles tries to maintain his pride in other ways. His favorite authors are the ones who write about the experiences he shares with them to some extent. That same feeling of needing to hide, of fearing violence simply for existing in the same way people who society deems ‘normal’ do. 

He turns Erik’s book over in his hands, running his fingers over the worn cover and spine and the softened corners of the pages. Are they alike, he and Erik and possibly even Gregor Samsa?

Charles finishes the novel not long after and goes searching for Erik to maybe discuss it some more and get a little more insight on what Erik thought, but he can’t seem to find the man anywhere. 

“I think he went into town,” Anne tells him where she’s washing fresh plums in the sink. “He left a while ago, though, I’m afraid.” 

Charles feels a bit dejected after that and he returns the book to Erik’s room, setting it neatly on Erik’s pillow the same way Erik had in his room. Charles tries to read a little more of his genetics book and when he can’t do that he tries to read more Vidal and when that doesn’t work he gives up and phones Moira. 

Moira is an incredibly sweet girl and Charles knows she has an incredibly large crush on him. He likes her, too, of course, just simply not as intensely as she him. She is, he feels, one of the only others around that seems to understand him, and what she lacks in genetic jargon knowledge she makes up for with wittiness and determination. He knows she’s probably busy with her other friends but even sitting around with them sounds like more fun than pacing around the house all day trying to decipher what exactly Erik meant by lending him that book.

After a brief phone call, Charles finds that Moira is in fact not busy and would love to come over, in her words. When she arrives, she kisses both of Charles’ cheeks like she’s French. Anne makes them cucumber sandwiches that they eat in the garden while Charles tells Moira all about Erik, how brilliant he is and that Charles doesn’t think he’s ever met anyone quite like him. 

“How long have you known him?” Moira giggles. 

“It hardly matters,” Charles admits with a laugh. “I don’t know, I just -- it feels as if I just agree with every utterance he makes. It’s a little frustrating, actually, you know how I feel about a good debate.”

“He sounds great,” Moira nods, relaxing onto her back and gazing up at the clouds. “Don’t forget me for your new friend,” she pouts as her hand comes up to his face. Her knuckles gently drag across his cheekbone before she slides her fingers through his hair. “I’ll get lonely.” 

“You have plenty of friends,” he tells her, rolling to lie on his stomach while propped up on his elbows. “And I won’t forget you, Moira, of course not. I’d have no one left to play chess with.” 

Moira’s smile breaks across her face with a light laugh. “You’re full of jokes, aren’t you?”

“Spilling over with them,” he nods. “Come,” Charles pushes up to his feet and offers her a hand, “how about some croquet?”

As it seems, Erik is the master of timing and possibly of parallels. Charles is charming, of course, despite what Raven may be convinced of, and well. He’s been playing croquet since he could swing a mallet and Moira simply hasn’t had that privilege. This, obviously, leads to some incredibly romantic opportunities to wrap his arms around hers and show her gently how to swing the mallet for her desired effect. 

He’s doing just that when something wills him to look up to his bedroom window, up to where Erik is looking right back down at him, leaning on the window frame. He looks utterly unbothered, regarding him with the same neutral smile he would watch a fountain with, or a sports game that he had no interest in. 

In his arms Moira giggles as they swing the mallet together with far more force than necessary. It’s her airy little “Oops!” that brings his attention back to the game. The metal hoop frame is bent at an angle now, standing crookedly from the ground. “That’s my bad,” Moira says, a rosy flush coloring her cheeks as she pulls slightly away from Charles. “I didn’t mean to put so much power behind it.” 

“It’s fine,” Charles promises her. “Let’s just skip this one, I’ll have someone come and deal with it later.” 

When she leaves, Moira kisses his cheek again. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for dinner,” she says, touching his chest lightly. Her big doe eyes are fixed on him, peering demurely up at him as if she suspects maybe he’ll kiss her. “I wish I could.” 

“Next time,” Charles nods, and Moira waits a moment as if suspecting him to say or do something else before taking a breath. 

“Next time,” she parrots, somewhat disappointed, then pulls away and walks to her bicycle and gives him a wave. She kicks the stand up and pedals delicately down the driveway. Charles waits until she’s past the gate, then turns and heads inside. He walks through the foyer and out to the backyard where he pulls up the dented frame and turns it over in his hands. 

It’s quite curious, in his opinion. He’d never seen such a thing -- maybe to other, more fragile frames, but the kind his family had were thick and expensive. Not typically what he’d expect to be bent by a wooden ball, and surely… surely he and Moira didn’t exert enough strength through one measly, half-distracted swing to bend it at such an angle. 

Nonetheless, Charles brushes the excess dirt from the frame and carries it back inside for the help to look at. 

“Charles,” it’s Erik’s voice behind him now, tugging his attention. 

“Erik,” Charles greets. “I tried to find you earlier to return your book, but Anne said you’d gone into the city. Did you have a good time?”

“Quite,” he nods, slowly approaching Charles. “I got to meet a few more people around, try to get my feet under me. I wouldn’t want to bother you all summer, after all, with me slowing you down.” 

Charles laughs at the implication that spending time with Erik had so far been anything but utterly delightful. “You don’t need to worry about that,” Charles assures the other man. “I quite enjoyed your company yesterday, and this morning.” 

Erik gives him another one of those looks like he’s staring at Charles’ heart and soul. “I’m happy to hear that,” he nods. “Did your girlfriend leave?”

It’s such a solicitous question that Charles splutters for a moment, then laughs. “Moira?” He asks. “No, no, she’s -- she’s just a good friend of mine. She’s -- we’re not. And we haven’t, and we won’t. It’s not like that.” Charles is aware that his face must be the shade of a strawberry by now. 

“Do you hold all of your friends like that?” Erik asks, and Charles huffs out another embarrassed laugh. 

He knows it’s nothing to be embarrassed by. It was some lighthearted flirting between two teenaged friends, nothing more. If it were Raven asking him the same question, Charles wouldn’t have a problem saying something cheeky back. But with Erik, it simply seems different, like Erik can see right through him. 

“We were just playing croquet,” Charles assures him. 

Erik nods, a frustratingly handsome amused look on his face. “I’m sure. Perhaps you could teach me to play sometime.” 

Charles, for one, isn’t sure what to make of that. He blinks back at Erik, utterly dumbfounded and speechless. Was Erik implying that he wanted to be held by Charles or was he simply teasing him, giving him a hard time because he was young and foolish and seemed to just be a boy with a crush he didn’t want to admit? 

“What’ve you got there?” Erik asks him. 

Charles holds up the frame and finds that the words aren’t forming in his mouth. “It’s bent,” he finally supplies. 

The frame isn’t small by any means, a geometric U shape that is far bigger than Charles’s hand. Peculiarly, though, Erik chooses the portion of the metal that Charles’ hand also occupies. 

“Nothing a little brute strength can’t fix,” Erik assures him, putting his hands on either side of the bend and applying leverage. In a normal situation, Charles would understand how ridiculous it was that a normal man would be able to bend metal of that thickness. Erik’s face is twisted with the effort he gives, but with a huff, he’s handing the frame back to Charles and brushing his hands on his pants. 

“I’ll see you for dinner, then?” Erik asks. 

“Yes,” Charles responds mindlessly, looking at the frame in his hands. He turns it over a few times, wiping his fingers over where the bend had been. It seems impossible, but there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that the metal had ever been deformed in any way. No bumps or waves or otherwise physical evidence that there had ever been another bend in the metal. Charles stands dumbfounded for a minute before he goes back outside to press it back into the soft ground. 

Maybe he and Erik are more alike than he’d suspected at all. 

Charles makes an attempt at retreating to his room, but not with much luck at all. Someone has locked it from the inside for some God-forsaken reason. It’s probably Raven going out of her way to inconvenience him before she ran off with her pair of boyfriends, but unfortunately, the only other way into his new bedroom is through his old one. The one currently occupied by one Erik Lehnsherr. 

He huffs, takes a deep breath to calm himself, then knocks lightly on Erik’s door. A moment later, Erik is pulling it open and all but leaning over him. 

“Sorry,” Charles huffs, his attempt at calming himself obviously futile as he feels a blush rising in his cheeks. “The lock on my door is stuck.”

“Oh,” Erik replies with a certain tone of apathy in his voice. “Feel free,” he assures the younger man, stepping aside. “I was just coming to look for you, in fact.” 

  
  


“Oh?”   
  


“After I came back I realized we didn’t discuss Kafka. If you wanted to, of course.”

Charles sees only an avenue to discuss what they share and nods eagerly as he steps into the room. “Absolutely. Um, I… most of my feelings aren’t changed from this morning. I have to ask, though, in the original German, is it still a beetle he transforms into?”

“ _ Ungeziefer _ doesn’t translate to English perfectly,” Erik tells him. “It’s… how can I explain it?” He asks himself. “It’s a creature unsuitable for anything. For sacrifice or eating or respect, really, to any degree. When it was first published, Kafka was insistent that the creature isn’t drawn. The  _ ungeziefer _ isn’t to be seen by anyone. I don’t think it’s by coincidence.”

Charles nods. “What do you think it means?” He asks, attempting to be as uninhibited as possible. “The metaphor of the…” Charles doesn’t want to butcher the spelling, so he waits for Erik to repeat. 

“Ungeziefer,” Erik supplies, and Charles parrots it back to him to the best of his abilities. “I think the transformation can represent a great variety of things. Transformation, perhaps, is not the right word. And the themes of isolation aren’t unlike what we see on any given day between humans. Locking people away for looking or acting differently. Samsa is still himself, you know, he simply looks different.”

“And he feels as though he must sacrifice himself to make life easier for the others in his family,” Charles agrees. “Every time he tries to leave his room, to be chased back in by his father, I think… I think it can be the idea of an attempt at pride. To show himself, and to once again be cut down. They never go back to loving him, it’s just a sense of… tolerance.” 

It seems that with every word from Erik’s mouth, Charles becomes more enraptured with his mind. Charles reckons he’s never felt more connected to anyone than to Erik, in the truest sense possible. Compared to Erik, no one on Earth has understood him better. The things Charles would give up just to have a moment enwreathed in Erik’s mind are boundless. Charles doesn’t even recognize how much time has passed until Anne was knocking lightly on the door to let them know that dinner was ready in the dining room. 

“I’ve enjoyed this,” Erik tells him as they descend the stairs together. “Perhaps we can discuss literature again some other time.” 

“I’d love that,” Charles agrees. He can’t help the bounce in his step and Charles is sure he’ll spend all of dinner thinking of things to discuss with Erik the next time he has an opportunity. 

“You’re very funny,” Charles tells Raven dryly as he takes his spot beside her at the table. 

She scowls at him around a bite of bread. “What did I do?”

“ _ Very _ ,” Charles emphasizes, utterly unimpressed, “funny.” 

“Okay,” comes her response, laced with what Charles is sure to be faux-impassivity. 

Charles drapes his napkin over his lap before he lifts his fork to begin eating. Rather than gush to Raven about how charming and intelligent Erik is, how he’s never seen someone so handsome and so bright, he staves off any risk of getting caught and stays quiet.

Raven, it seems, has other plans and begins telling Charles of her day with Hank. That he’d taken her to the museum and it had been beautiful and wonderful and they’d walked through the Trinity gardens afterward, and Charles thinks he’s doing quite a good job feigning interest with his nods and hums of encouragement when he hears something from Erik that makes his attention take a sharp left. 

He’s laughing, nodding along with whatever it was that his mother had said. “I did, certainly. I spent the morning exploring on my own, trying to get my bearings. I met quite a beautiful woman when I was riding down the street, Emma?”

“Oh, the Frosts! They’re family friends,” Charles’ father agrees excitedly. “They’re in the jewelry business.”

Charles doesn’t catch what comes after that, too focused on trying to wash the lump in his throat down with iced water. He knows that it’s a little… well, Charles had simply gotten his hopes up. Maybe the book had been just that after all, a peace offering to his employer’s son who was obviously quite the bibliophile after he took his room. Maybe it had all just been Erik’s own generosity, not any particular reason that he would be connected to Charles other than their interest in literature. 

He tries not to feel so betrayed by it, but a simple hour ago he’d felt as though Erik knew him as a person better than his own sister or closest friends did. It’s not fair for him to be upset with Erik over this, or to maintain the thought that he has any clue about what Erik is like as a person. If anything, it’s biased to think that Erik understood him anyway, no matter how desperate he was for a simple connection. Maybe it’s a little bit of Raven’s fault, how she’d gotten in his head about getting out there and he’d simply latched onto the first new thing that came along like a sick puppy. 

“Charles.” 

His head snaps up like a marionette with its strings yanked. “Excuse me,” he dismisses immediately. Four pairs of eyes stare back at him. Raven bumps him with her elbow. 

“You didn’t say you saw Moira today,” she says with an amused look. 

“Oh,” Charles shakes his head a little, “she came by for lunch and we played croquet, it wasn’t really worth mentioning.” 

“Your son is incredibly charming,” Erik compliments, “I saw some moves I might have to steal from him.” 

Charles’ parents laugh and Charles gives a superficial one back. Charles’ mother makes a comment about him getting it from his father and Charles slinks out of the conversation as subtly as he can. 

When dinner is finished, Charles doesn’t dawdle and wait around to ask if Erik would like to discuss the details of German literature any longer, but rather changes into an Oxford crewneck and takes his novel from his room down to the grounds. He hasn’t been able to solve the lock issue, so his only route in is still through his old room, but Charles is quick and doesn’t bump into him. 

He finds the route that leads him towards the edge of their property where a clearing sits before a picturesque river. The moon hangs bright and pure above him and grants him plenty of light to take a seat on among sprigs of wildflowers and get back to reading. His focus seems to come back to him almost spitefully so as if frustrated too with his dampened hopes. 

Unfortunately, the peaceful hum of water flowing and ambient pastoral sounds is interrupted by the niggling feeling of a mind approaching. Charles doesn’t react, not even when he hears feet behind him. 

“‘Loafe with me on the grass’,” Erik tells him, “‘loose the stop from your throat; not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best’,” he takes a seat beside Charles, just a hairsbreadth away. “‘Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice’.”

Charles can tell he’s about to open his mouth, so Charles beats him to the point without looking up from his book. “Walt Whitman,” he interrupts. “Leaves of Grass.” 

“And a poetry fan as well,” Erik says, amusement in his voice. 

Charles wants to respond that he’ll take what he can from homosexual authors, but his doubts from dinner are still eating at him. There will be someday when he doesn’t have to be scared to tell another that he’s attracted to men, but that day is not today. He doesn’t fear Erik -- he could put the man to sleep right here in the dirt if he so pleased -- but dinner has put a raincloud over him. 

“A Whitman fan,” Charles corrects. “He was an empath and he was incredibly smart, I always liked that about him. ‘Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you’.”

“Awfully optimistic,” Erik remarks. 

“Some of us must be.” 

Erik doesn’t respond for a moment, eyes studying the scene before them. Untouched bucolic scenery bathed in the serene, milky light of the moon. Charles sits and reads beside him. 

Evidently, with Erik near once more, his focus isn’t as refined. He keeps getting distracted by Erik’s legs seeing as the man has decided to wear shorts out at this hour. He’s half reclined in the grass beside Charles, propped up on his elbows as he studies… whatever it is he’s looking at.

“What are you reading?” Erik asks him eventually. 

“Vidal,” Charles answers. “ _ The City and The Pillar _ .”

Erik hums thoughtfully as if he knows what the book is about. Charles keeps his eyes firmly on the pages in front of him, but he can feel Erik’s mind begging for attention. “Is it any good?”

“Compared to what I normally read,” Charles responds coolly, “a breath of fresh air.” He really needed to understand the obsession authors had with giving their characters, gay ones in particular, horribly tragic endings. 

“You have quite a peculiar taste in books,” Erik remarks. “Whitman, Vidal, White, Forster, Wilde, Pynchon, Puig. I saw them all in your room, on the shelves. And beyond that, it’s all scientific reading. Textbooks and scholarly works. ” 

Charles doesn’t typically worry about others seeing that his shelves are stocked full with stories of queer men and women. After all, they aren’t stories that are widely discussed. Anyone who didn’t know the stories in the books was of gay men and women would simply assume that it was just a shelf of random books. The insinuation was both obvious and dangerous. 

For the first time since Erik had sat beside him, Charles looks up and over his shoulder to meet the other man’s eyes. In a carefully defiant and yet polite tone, Charles replies, “I don’t think there’s anything peculiar about it at all.” He gives a slight frown, then holds his gaze for a moment longer before turning back to his book. Charles wouldn’t deny being afraid sometimes, but he most certainly was not ashamed. If Erik still doesn’t quite understand, Charles repeats another Whitman quote to him, “‘I exist as I am, and that is enough’.”

Erik, to his credit, doesn’t press again. He sits quietly while Charles reads beside him for what feels like hours before he sits up and puts his hand on Charles’ shoulder to help himself up. “Goodnight, Charles,” he says, though he stands in front of Charles and lifts his arms up to stretch.

Charles spares him a glance. The raincloud has dissipated, his usual calm and happy demeanor back. “Goodnight, Erik.” 

It seems, though, that Erik is not quite done with the quotes. “Can I leave you with another line of prose?”

“I suspect you’ll do so even if I deny you.”

Erik gives him a sharp smile. “‘You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself’,” Erik takes a breath. “I’ll see you at breakfast.” 

With that, Erik’s frustratingly toned legs are taking him back towards the house. Erik was telling him to keep his eyes open, no? But why? Charles lets out quite a dramatic noise and flops onto his back, draping his book over his face. It’s only been a pair of days, he tells himself. Could his father have possibly chosen any other student to invite out here? Maybe one less handsome and well-versed in queer literature?

When he finally goes back home, the lock on his door is still stuck. He spends a moment with his forehead pressed to the wood, reminding himself to hold Raven hostage tomorrow until she fixes his stupid doorknob. He quietly knocks on Erik’s door -- which is his door, really, this living situation is so much more complicated than is strictly necessary -- and then lets himself in. 

Erik is quite tragically shirtless and stretched across Charles’ bed. He sleeps on his stomach, one arm tucked under the pillow and Charles can see the elastic of his boxer shorts before he disappears beneath the sheets. Much like his legs, his back is disastrously muscled and well-defined like absolutely no grad student has the right to be. 

Though Charles’ feet stay firmly planted on the floor, he thinks about crossing the room and tracing the contours of his body with his fingertips and possibly following their trail with his tongue. The moonlight highlights the dips and mounds of his body, tempting him all the more, but Charles shuts his eyes, then sighs again and walks through the bathroom to his bedroom. He gets ready for bed then lies down and jerks himself off to a rather disappointing orgasm, but he can’t expect to have anything mind-blowing when a literal Adonis is a room over and you can’t tell if he’s flirting with you or not. So, yes. He blames Erik for his lackluster climax. 

The next coming days, again and again, Charles spends the morning reading. Erik is actually doing what he’s meant to be doing, all quarantined in his dad’s study with his father, sorting through papers and studies and making notes on things and whatever else it is Erik is meant to be doing while he’s here. Charles stays in the library, occasionally interrupted by Erik or his father looking for a book, or by Anne to tell him that someone is on the phone for him or that lunch is ready. 

After lunch, every day, Erik invites him for a game of chess. Sometimes it’s only one game and sometimes it’s a few, depending on their respective plans for the evening. Erik wins, usually. Charles tries to be annoyed by it. Some evenings include walks around the grounds and discussions on whatever they can think of. Family, news, philosophy, history, genetics. Erik lets him talk about genetics quite a lot, more than anyone else usually does. Charles often finds himself rambling away about chromosomal translocation and will stop himself, asking Erik if he’d like to talk about something else. 

“Don’t apologize for passion,” Erik tells him once. “Never. And keep going. Are you able to detect with any certainty what alterations might do to a specific gene?”

He finds that masturbating to the thought of his father’s grad student has done nothing to help with the sexual frustration. If anything, it’s only made it worse. He can’t stop thinking about the man’s stupid back or his stupid thighs and while studying gene sequences is riveting, truly, he’s far too horny to focus for longer than a few minutes at a time. 

Raven maintains that it wasn’t her who broke the lock, even when he tells his mother at lunch that Raven did it. 

“For the last time, I didn’t touch your door,” Raven whines. 

“Has it stopped working on its own accord then?” Charles asks, and Raven shakes her head. 

“Probably, it’s an old door, Charles. Sometimes things break,” she replies matter-of-factly. 

“Awful convenient for it to stop working just after I moved rooms,” Charles dismisses. 

“Why would I bother messing with your door? What -- I don’t have anything to gain from that?”

“I don’t know, to inconvenience me? Truly I am the one who should be asking you that.” 

“Charles,” his mother interrupts, and when he looks at her he can see Erik laughing quietly at them. “Raven, please, with the bickering at the table. Raven, if you’ve done anything --” 

“I didn’t!”

“-- Please fix it, and Charles, please don’t make baseless claims against your sister. It’s unbecoming of you.” 

“Yeah, Charles,” Raven agrees while cocking her head. 

Charles rolls his eyes while his mother apologizes to Erik for the two of them.

Days after his conversation with Erik by the bank, a knock at the door pulls his attention and for a split second, he finds himself hoping that it’s Erik. It isn’t. 

“Sir, there’s a young woman on the phone for you,” Anne tells him, and Charles stands from his place at the desk. 

“Thank you, Anne,” he replies politely, following her out into the hall to get the phone. “Hello?” he asks into the receiver. 

“Charles!” Moira’s silvery voice comes, “Good morning, how are you?”

“I’m well, Moira, and yourself?” He asks, “It’s good to hear from you again.”

“I can’t complain, thank you. I was actually wondering if you’d like to come down to the plaza later on today, we’re having a bit of a party down there and then I think we might go to a taphouse or something after.” 

Charles hesitates for a moment, looking down the hall to the door of his father’s study. “I’d love to, Moira, thank you,” he responds, “do you mind if I bring a friend?”

“A friend?” Moira asks. 

“Just my father’s graduate student,” Charles assures her. “He’s around Raven’s age, I -- I don’t want to leave him here at the mercy of my parents, you know?”

“Of course! Of course, you can bring him, Charles.” There seems to be a sense of relief that he didn’t mean he was planning on bringing another girl around. If only she knew. “The more the merrier.” 

“Thank you, again, Moira. What time should we be there?”

“We’ll be heading to the plaza soon, and I think heading into town afterward maybe at six or so?”

“We’ll be there, you have my word.” 

Moira gives an airy giggle over the phone. “I look forward to it. Bye, Charles.” 

“I’ll see you, Moira.” Charles puts the receiver down and heads for his bedroom. His lock is still stuck and Raven had been particularly avoidant that morning, so he’s still using his old room to get in. Charles closes the door to the bathroom and turns on the light. 

It’s not as if he doesn’t know that he’s decently good looking. Charles knows that he’s handsome enough, that his face is still boyish in a way that girls seem to like and sometimes garners a second look from men. He runs his hands through his hair and fixes his part until he’s pleased with how the curls fall across his forehead and tuck behind his ear. 

He pulls the door back open and walks with confidence through the room and out into the hall, down to Raven’s room. Despite the maids’ best efforts, hers always seems distinctly less organized than his own. He rifles through the bathroom cabinets until he finds a bottle of hairspray and gives himself a light spritzing, just to keep things in place for tonight. He carefully shapes his hair to his liking once more, then sprays it again. He’s careful not to douse it too heavily -- he doesn’t wish to look like he’s trying, after all. It needs to look natural. 

Once he’s happy with his hair, Charles goes back up to his bathroom and locks the door on Erik’s side. He studies himself again, his eyebrows and the slope of his nose and the shade of his own eyes and the arch of his cupid’s bow. After studying himself, he follows the contours of his face with a fingertip. He swipes his eyebrows into place and gently moves to his cheekbone, then traces his jawline and finally his lips. He drags his finger over his cupid’s bow and his lower lip, drawing a bit of saliva down. Charles pulls his hand away, then sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and worries his teeth into it a few times, then follows suit with his upper lip. When he’s finished he looks a bit like he’s applied Raven’s lip gloss.

His next move brings him into his bedroom, pulling open the drawers of his dresser and digging through until he finds a pair of jean shorts. He quickly pulls them on and returns to the mirror, looking himself over for longer and more thoroughly than he’s ever bothered with before. He turns away from the mirror and looks over his shoulder, eyes on his ass before huffing and walking back in to find a belt. He slides the belt on and then looks again, this time more pleased with the effect. He fiddles with the hem of his shorts, rolling it up an inch, then rolling it up once more. After he deems it decent, Charles goes back into his room and digs through his dresser for a shirt. He finds a nice one, white with a black and blue splatter print -- he remembers buying it at a boutique in Greenwich earlier this year and there simply doesn’t seem like a more fitting chance than to wear it tonight

Charles, if he does say so himself, looks great. He tucks his shirt in and leaves the first few buttons undone on his shirt. Erik doesn’t stand a chance. 

He throws open the bathroom door to head out and find him, but Erik is standing a few feet away from him. He makes a vaguely surprised face at the door suddenly being pulled open, “Charles.”

“Erik,” Charles breathes. He watches Erik’s eyes take him in, looking over his outfit. 

“Are you going somewhere?” He asks. 

“I was actually going to look for you,” Charles admits, then licks his lips and feels his chest puff as Erik’s gaze flicks to watch his tongue swipe across his bottom lip. “A few of my friends are getting together for the evening and I was wondering if you’d like to come along with me.”

“Ah,” Erik says and looks Charles over once more. He’s moved to the bed now, searching idly through his bag as he regards Charles. “I don’t suppose I’ve got anything better to do, and a friend of yours is a friend of mine, Charles, I’d love to.” 

“Awesome,” Charles grins. “I’ll meet you downstairs?”

It turns out that two can play at this game. 

Erik joins him in a plain white button-down, one that isn’t buttoned up at all, and a pair of impossibly red shorts that make his legs look far too good. Even worse, when they arrive at the plaza, Erik joins a game of pick-up football with none other than Emma Frost. Charles sits on the sideline with Moira, beneath the shade of a large oak. It’s incredibly frustrating to have to watch Erik run around topless and sweating in the sun, sliding into the dirt and picking Emma up to twirl her around when they score. The attention was supposed to be going the other way. He’s already irritated with how much attention he gives Erik, today he was supposed to turn the tables -- and here he is trying to listen to Moira talk about what’s going on with Alex while Erik flaunts his stupid toned body around. 

“Excuse me,” he says, and he knows it’s rude because Moira is in the middle of a sentence, but God he can’t hear another word or go another moment just staring uselessly at Erik’s body. He heads for the cooler and pulls out a glass bottle, undoing the cap and taking a sip. 

It isn’t a moment since he’s pressed the glass to his lips that a very large and warm arm is sliding around his waist, and a hand is pulling the bottle from his hand. “Charles,” Erik pants beside him, and for a moment Charles feels as if he’s having a stroke. Erik is so close to him that he feels the heat radiating off his body, that he can see the sweat dripping from his neck down his chest, sees his lips wrapped around the mouth of the bottle and the long pillar of his throat as his head tipped back. His free hand rests on the small of Charles’ back as he swallows gulp after gulp of water. And then as quickly as he appeared, he’s handing Charles the bottle with a quick “thanks,” and he’s back in the game. 

This man is going to give him whiplash. He’s sure of it.

While the plaza is a complete and utter bust, the bar is better. The bartender is a friend of Raven’s and doesn’t have a problem serving Charles a pitcher of sangria that he shares with Moira. It’s watered down with fruit juice, he can tell, but it’s enough to get him dancing in the twilight. Someone has a classy, happy tune playing over the speakers when Charles pulls Moira out into the dancefloor by her hand, letting his hips and arms sway to the music. 

Erik is on the edge, sitting among Emma and some of Emma’s friends. He has a tall glass of beer in his hand, his other hand draped over Emma’s shoulders. Evidently, Erik is also better at multitasking as he speaks to Emma but keeps his eyes on Charles. 

Charles isn’t exactly being shy about watching back, either. When Moira is facing him, of course, he looks her in the eyes and sings the lyrics along with her, but when he swings her under his arm and then back against him, his gaze falls onto to Erik. 

As far as stares go, it’s quite intense. Erik’s eyes locked on his while he sips his beer and pulls Emma closer, as he mutters something in her ear to make her giggle and touch his chest. Thank God he’d put his shirt back on and done up a few of the buttons. Charles looks right back at him as he wraps his arms around Moira’s stomach and pulls her back against him, and then again when she’s so close to him that he’s muttering how nice she looks while he only has eyes for the man sitting behind her. 

He should feel worse about it, that he’s all but using Moira as a stepping stool -- and he will, surely, at a time when he isn’t in the heat of the moment and all of his focus isn’t on winning this stupid game he’s playing with Erik. 

Truly, he’s not sure who wins. If there even is a winner. It’s foolish and he knows it, he feels it when Moira is obviously awaiting a kiss at the gate of her house and Charles simply feels as though giving in is the only thing he can do. It’s brief, just a quick press of the lips and Charles knows she wanted more but he also knows she’s far too polite to look a gift horse in the mouth. She’s proper. She’s not going to complain about a gift. 

Still, the guilt he feels over kissing Moira and stringing her along doesn’t last long when he’s in his bedroom and Erik is there in the doorway of his bathroom, asking him if he’d like to take a walk. 

“Did you have a good time tonight?” Charles asks with his hands in his pockets as they walk the trail to the edge of the property, back to the stream. 

“I did,” Erik nods in response. There’s a quiet smile on his lips and Charles wishes so badly to look him in the eyes and see what that smile might mean, but Erik’s eyes are only on the horizon. They are very specifically not veering to the left, where Charles walks beside him as if he knows Charles wants to look him in the eyes and is teasing him, taunting him. “You kissed Moira.” 

“You saw that?” Charles laughs, scratching at the back of his neck and averting his gaze from Erik now. “And -- to be fair, she kissed me.”

Erik clicks his tongue. “It looked mutual from where I stood,” he remarks, his chin high and that damned smirk on his lips. 

“And Emma? And you?” Charles counters. He’s eager to get the attention off of his morally grey intentions with someone he considers a very good friend. 

“She’s quite beautiful,” Erik nods, “though I typically go for brunettes. I think she quite likes me.”

Charles wants to ask if Erik has ever come across anyone who didn’t like him, who wasn’t utterly charmed by him, but he also thinks that may go to Erik’s head and Charles is trying to play hard to get. “What gave you that idea?” 

Erik shrugs, then turns to him with that smile, that smile like he could see right through all of Charles’ juvenile tactics and maladroit flirting like he knew how badly Charles wanted him. All of him, his mind and his body and his person and all of the tiny pieces in between. Like he knew he had a monopoly over Charles’s mind and he liked it. “Just a suspicion,” he answers casually. 

They walk up to the river and Erik goes right up to the bank, then starts undoing his shirt. “Care for a swim, Charles?” His chest is puffed and his chin raised and after all the work Charles has done tonight, he’s not going to back down from a challenge. 

Charles could point out that the water is going to be freezing and that there could be an undercurrent and they could both die, but he doesn’t. Foolishly so, he thinks as he unbuttons his shirt wordlessly. Since when was he the kind to overlook things like that simply for a boy?

But then again, Erik is quite obviously not a boy. He’s very much a man in all senses of the word and he’s been telling himself that there simply isn’t any way a man like Erik could find interest in a boy like him, but Charles isn’t blind either. Not that Erik is subtle about the way he looks at Charles when there aren’t many others around, but… he knows that maybe this is nothing but a fantasy. But maybe it isn’t.

They strip down to their underwear and Erik heads in first, powering through up to his waist like the water isn’t utterly frigid. Charles follows after at a much slower pace, taking smaller steps in the soft mud that lines the stream. The current isn’t too bad and the water is more shocking than it is cold. Before him, Erik is already dunking himself underneath. 

“Come on,” he goads Charles when he comes up, shaking his hair out. “It’s not so bad.” 

“Did you swim in the Hudson for fun as a child?” Charles teases back. 

“It gets better once you put your head under.” 

Charles takes another deep step and winces. 

“Give me a break,” Erik huffs, swimming over. He gets a hand around Charles’ waist and gives him a tug towards the deepest part of the river. 

The younger boy only has a moment to yelp before Erik is pushing him under and swimming after him. Admittedly, Erik is right. The temperature is much more bearable now that his head is under, but he’s also face to face with Erik, and Erik’s very large hands are holding him around his waist, his bare waist. He knows getting lost in someone’s eyes is utterly banal, but Erik’s are so green they shock him every time. Even now, underwater with only the moon to offer light, Charles finds himself unable to look away until he realizes he’s about to drown. 

His desperate gasp for air as he breaks the surface can’t be anything close to alluring, but his lungs are screaming for oxygen with an intensity that leaves his chest heaving. He shakes his hair from his face and finds himself grinning as he pants, kicking his legs to stay afloat in the gentle current. Erik grins back at him wildly with a light chuckle. 

For a moment, that’s all they exist as. Laughter coming from the river at night. 

Erik attempts to pull his hands away from Charles’ body, now that the touch isn’t necessary, but Charles beats him to it. His hands wrap around Erik’s forearms and press them back to where they’d been, donning a more solemn expression. Wide-eyed enough that the remnants of his uncertainty are plenty visible. Erik paddles them over to a place where Charles can reach the bottom and allows him a moment to rest. 

“I’ve been thinking of what you said the other day, the Whitman quote,” Erik tells him. “‘I exist as I am, and that is enough’. Do you know the rest of that stanza?” He asks, and Charles hears the crickets at a deafening tone. 

He wonders if Erik can feel his heart pounding -- and if he can, does he think it’s simple exertion? 

Charles gives him a nod and begins reciting. “‘I exist as I am, that is enough’ --” 

“‘If no other in the world be aware I sit content’,” Erik interrupts, “‘And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait’.” Erik pauses as if to allow the words to sink into Charles’s skin. 

Charles can hardly breathe. His grip on Erik’s forearms falls away, and to his quiet excitement, Erik’s hands stay steady on his body. 

“I haven’t stopped thinking about it since you said it,” Erik admits with a gentle shake of his head. “I had to go back and read over the entire thing a few times.” 

Charles doesn’t respond, and for a long moment, neither of them says a word. Charles can only feel the cool of the water and the searing heat where Erik holds him, can only hear crickets and the gentle flow of water and the lilt of Erik’s voice, and it feels as though Erik exists in all his senses at that moment, as though Erik is, if only for a moment, only for him. Charles’ hands wrap around the bulk of Erik’s biceps and he draws him in closer, his lips parted and tilted up. 

Erik remains suspended ever so slightly over him, breathing into his mouth. There’s something holding him back, keeping him from pressing into Charles so intensely they become one. Even just the feeling of Erik’s gentle panting across his lips has Charles nearly shaking with anticipation. His hands slip from Erik’s biceps to his shoulders and finally to his neck. They pull closer, twisted around one another in the numbing temperature. 

“Did you bring me out all this way just to quote nineteenth-century poesy at me?” Charles asks, his voice little more than a panted tease. Erik gives him a laugh, quiet and huffed, but doesn’t relent. He wants to goad him, more, to beg Erik to be the one to make the final step, but Erik remains steady. Almost as if he’s content just to exist in private like this, holding one another. 

Charles, on the other hand, is not. He enjoys this feeling of intimacy, extremely, but he craves that final piece of the puzzle. This touching is a check, but the kiss is the checkmate. Charles keens upwards and draws his tongue from his mouth, licking over Erik’s lips gently. 

He feels the tremor that travels through Erik’s body, and Erik finally moves. He ducks his head, possibly to kiss Charles’ cheek or jaw or neck, but Charles feels as though he’s been waiting decades for this and presses right in to kiss him. For a moment, Charles is the only one kissing him. He feels all of the seventeen years that he is, unsure what to do, if kissing a man is somehow different than kissing a girl of his own age. 

Erik doesn’t let him flounder for long, though, and pulls back only enough to hear the quiet sound of their lips parting before pressing in and kissing Charles once more. Charles feels like a livewire, like he’s won the lottery -- no, no, not the lottery. Maybe a Nobel prize. Something that he worked for and put thought and critical thinking into and now it’s coming to a head. Now he’s getting what he earned. 

Just as Charles had suspected, kissing Erik is nothing like kissing Moira. His jaw is wide and hard and stubbly where hers was soft and sloped, and Erik kisses him with much more passion and power than has ever been an option with Moira. He kisses Charles as if he’s been thinking of this moment just as much as Charles had, as if he’s been waiting just as long. Erik’s stubble scratches against the soft skin of his jaw, his fingers dig into the flesh of his waist. His tongue is in Charles’ mouth, pressing against Charles’ before he’s sucking and biting at Charles’ bottom lip.

Charles can’t help but feel somewhat overwhelmed at the sensation. Erik is everywhere, it seems, and he’s still trying to process the idea that Erik really and truly wants him back. He feels as if he’s barely keeping up with Erik, trying desperately to maintain pace in a race Erik is set to win. 

He’s pulled out of it all with Erik’s laugh. Charles can’t help himself and, in a desperate attempt to re-initiate the kiss, surges up and smacks another one against Erik’s lips. Erik chuckles at him again and finds a grip on Charles’ wrists, pulling them away from his shoulders and instead tucking them against his chest. Erik draws him in, guiding his head to rest on Erik’s shoulder, his forehead against his neck and Erik’s arms wrapped around him, holding him close. Somewhere in the shuffle of kissing, they’d moved further out towards the center of the river to an area where Charles’ feet now dangled just above the bottom. 

For a long while, neither of them say anything. Erik holds him and Charles allows himself to be held. He feels raw in some ways like Erik has just peeled back a part of him and slipped himself inside. Charles isn’t sure how to get rid of him now and knows that failure to determine a way through this problem could have some quite disagreeable consequences come the end of summer.

“Are you cold?” Erik asks him, voice so low it seems he’s trying not to disturb the water voles. 

Charles is, he feels utterly glacial, but he doesn’t want this moment to end. Saying yes will mean that Erik lets go of him and they go inside, and though he might not want to admit it, that thought worries him. “No,” he fibs easily, snuggling in closer. “Are you?”

“Absolutely,” Erik answers, tightening his grip on Charles’ torso and heading for their clothes on the grassy bank. 

“No, no,” Charles whines as he grips Erik’s shoulders. “Let’s stay a bit longer.”

“First you don’t want to get in, now you don’t want to get out,” Erik teases. His arm slips under Charles’ knees, effectively carrying him out of the water. 

“Things in motion tend to want to stay in motion,” Charles responds, and despite the freezing air chill, he feels his face heat up. 

“Alright, Isaac,” Erik chuckles. He carries Charles with ease from the river, then sets him gently down in the grass and shakes his hair out. 

Charles dresses himself slowly. Erik is… distracting, to say the least. “Are you waiting for something?” Erik asks him with a smirk. 

“No,” Charles laughs, looking away and doing up mismatched buttons on his shirt. 

“You seem distracted.” 

“You’re distract _ ing, _ ” Charles replies. In the time it’s taken him to fasten the wrong buttons in the wrong holes, Erik has dressed himself completely. 

“I’m not going to wait for you,” Erik threatens, slowly walking backwards towards the house. 

Charles shoves his legs into his shorts. “Hey, no --” 

“I’m already going!” 

His hands scramble at his shoes, yanking his feet into his shoes and running after Erik. Erik, the wretched tease, sees Charles running to catch up and turns around to run towards the house. Personally, Charles doesn’t feel like a game of tag at the moment, but Erik isn’t giving him much choice in the matter. He wants to go where Erik is. 

Erik makes him chase him all the way back to the house, laughing through labored breaths as he slows beside the back door. 

“That was cruel,” Charles pants. 

“I was cold,” Erik justifies. “I had to warm up.” 

“Cruel,” Charles repeats, and Erik leans down to kiss him, just a light brush of the lips, but something exciting nonetheless. 

“I’ll have to find some way to make it up to you,” Erik’s hand comes up and cups his jaw, swiping his thumb over Charles’ lips.

Charles pants through his grin, following close behind as Erik goes inside and heads up the stairs. He finds that he isn’t bothered by the stuck lock on his door. They both stuff themselves inside the bathroom and Erik turns the water on and then -- and then begins stripping out of his clothes. Charles feels the familiar turn of nervous excitement in his stomach and quickly follows suit. His rapid movements are sloppy, though, and he’s sure he looks utterly juvenile with the fervor he’s trying to strip down, not unlike an overexcited puppy, but he’s hoping that Erik will be too focused on himself to see how uncoordinated Charles looks at the moment. 

When he’s finally bare, Erik is already in the shower, and Charles feels an uninvited sense of worry like maybe Erik didn’t mean for him to join him at all. Just as he hesitates, though, Erik draws the curtain over a touch and asks, “Are you coming?”

Charles’ face splits with a smile once more and he lets Erik pull him in. The water is warm and Erik is warmer against his back, his fingers pulling through Charles’ hair. He gets lost in time, simply existing as a body for Erik to act upon as he’s kissed and turned and has his hair washed. Charles is surprised but not disappointed -- he thought they were going to be having sex in here, after all, so once Erik carefully rinses his hair clean, Charles tries to trail a hand down his stomach. 

Erik is far too quick for him and takes his hand, spins him to face the spray of the showerhead. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says gently, and Charles feels just a tiny bit humiliated. 

“Why?” Charles whimpers quietly, uselessly, desperately.

“I know myself,” Erik responds in his ear, voice low and gruff and not doing anything at all to ease Charles’ sexual frustration. “We’ve been good,” he says, “we haven’t done anything to be ashamed of, and that’s a good thing.” Erik swallows and Charles hears it over the sound of water. His fingers trail up Charles’ arms, then wrap around his chest and hold him close. “I want to be good. Okay?” 

_ No _ , Charles thinks,  _ it’s not okay, because I’ll die of blue balls before you ever get the chance to fuck me _ . He doesn’t say anything, just huffs indignantly, and the bastard behind him kisses his neck in response, then turns off the water. 

Erik hands him a towel first, then gets one for himself. They dry off together, side by side, and finally, Erik leans over to kiss him. “Goodnight, Charles,” he says, and then he laughs quietly. 

_ There’s nothing funny _ , Charles wants to say, no matter how much he might sound like an indignant child. 

“Are these your puppy-dog eyes?” He asks, and Charles lifts his chin a little more. Erik leans in and kisses him lightly again. 

“Are they working?” 

“Far too well,” Erik confirms. “Goodnight, Charles,” he repeats, then presses another feather-light kiss to his lips and leaves Charles standing in his bathroom with a towel around his shoulders. 

Charles quickly dries off his hair, then huffs to himself. He dresses himself in mismatched pajamas, then screams into one of his pillows.

He’s too turned-on to think, and he’s a little indignant that he could possibly be wrung out from an orgasm and cuddled against Erik’s side at the moment if not for Erik’s stupid self-control. He pushes another pillow between his legs and humps it for yet another distinctly unsatisfying climax. Charles is nearly too frustrated to change his boxers, completely resigned to the sticky mess -- until he realizes doing that will interfere with him watching Erik come in from his run in the morning, and that motivates him out of bed and over to his dresser. 

Erik is similarly infuriatingly disciplined through the next days. He has no qualms about kissing Charles in private, whether it be in the library or in the river or the shade of a fruit tree, and Charles does his best to take advantage at any chance he can. He can tell he’s wearing Erik down. 

“Must I explain the irony of this situation to you?” Charles whines, his back on the soft ground and his eyes following Erik’s face. 

“Mmm,” Erik hums, dangling the cherry over his lips. “You seem to like doing that, explaining things.” 

Charles opens his mouth and his tongue traces the surface of the cherry, swirling his tongue around it until Erik pities him and his sexual frustration enough to lower it. He takes it gently between his teeth, then wraps his lips around it and moans. Erik wants to say something, to call him silly, that no cherry can possibly taste so good that it would deserve a sound like that, but he’s quite distracted by the juice gathering at his lips, how the cherries he’s already eaten have tinted his lips a beautiful, deep shade of carmine.

Erik tugs the stem free from the fruit and leans in, biting off the rest of the cherry and proceeding to suck the flavor from Charles’ perfect mouth. Deep kissing around a cherry pit is somewhat awkward and Erik is a little concerned that Charles might choke on it, but he’s also too invested in the kiss to do much about it. He’s sure to suck the seed into his own mouth before he pulls away, then turns his head and spits it into the grass. 

“That’s charming,” Charles teases. 

“You’re charming,” Erik counters immediately as he pulls Charles’s wandering hand from his stomach. “And utterly rapacious,” he dips his head down and kisses at Charles’ neck. 

“And you are utterly parsimonious,” Charles sighs. “Let me touch you,” he begs. 

“I have to question if you’d even know how,” it’s Erik’s turn to tease, and he brings Charles’ hand to his mouth to kiss. 

“I’m a fast learner,” Charles tries, but it doesn’t seem as though Erik is listening. He ducks his head down and presses a kiss to Charles’ chest where his shirt has been pulled down. Erik’s other hand pushes Charles’ shirt up. He kisses down his sternum, then lightly over his belly, then sucks a mark in the delicate hairs of Charles’ happy trail. 

At some point, Charles has to give himself a break and stop blaming all his erections on his teenage hormones -- especially when Erik seems to find a great deal of joy in doing things like this and leaving him high and dry. He lets out a hissed breath, sliding one hand through Erik’s hair lightly. “You’re so frustrating,” Charles nearly cries. 

“Am I?” Erik asks, and much to Charles’ surprise, he grips him through his shorts. 

“Yes,” Charles confirms, his voice higher and tighter than it had been before and he thinks if Erik pulls away now, he may very well actually cry. 

Erik shushes him lightly, tsking quietly as he chases Charles’s mouth. Charles can feel Erik undoing his shirt and he suddenly feels quite amateur, laid out in the shadow of a cherry tree. His hands are fisted in the soft grass and Erik is kissing him so gently as his hand slides into Charles’ pants and rubs over his cock. 

He’s been hard many times around Erik, he’d argue he’s usually at least a little hard around Erik, but never like this. Erik hasn’t touched him until this moment and the feeling is something he could get drunk on. Erik’s hand gently cups at his balls, then strokes him up and down his length fully. His fingers are obviously experienced as they pull his boxers away, managing not a single touch to his bare cock. 

Erik pulls away ever so slightly and for a moment Charles thinks he’ll really pull away. His green eyes are steady on Charles’ blues, ever so intense as he spits into his hand and brings it down to grip Charles’ erection again, spreading it around generously. Charles lets out another bated breath and surges up to kiss him while Erik’s hand settles into a quick pace. It feels like every unsatisfying orgasm he’s had since Erik has arrived has suddenly decided to rear it’s unsympathetic head and arrive just at this moment. 

His grip is tight and hot as he works Charles’ cock, milking whines and high little sounds out of Charles’ throat effortlessly. Charles attempts to whine Erik’s name but every time he tries to form a syllable his mouth gives out on him, his jaw slack as he whines over and over again. He finds himself unable to even warn Erik of his impending orgasm, simply useless as he’s overwhelmed with a rush of endorphins he’s never felt anything like. 

Maybe he blacks out for a moment -- how pathetic, he thinks dejectedly, to be so affected by a handjob -- but when he opens his eyes again, Erik is still hanging above him. He feels Erik’s hand sliding through the mess on his stomach and then watches in awe as he sucks a finger clean. 

“You’re certainly fast,” Erik credits, “though I’m not sure how much learning got done.”

“And you’re insufferable,” Charles replies truthfully. Erik seems to get a kick out of that if the pleased smile he gets is anything to go by. “Kiss me, please.” 

Erik, thankfully, has no smart comment or quip about that one and leans in to kiss him deeply. Charles can taste something distinctly different about Erik’s mouth and realizes it must be the taste of his own semen -- a thought he feels he should be more uncomfortable with than he actually is. 

Charles tries to clean himself off as best he can before Erik helps him up and they walk back to the house for dinner. Erik kisses him in his bedroom and then excuses himself to find Charles’ father to ask him a question. 

With nothing else pressing at his mind, Charles goes downstairs to help set the table. He’s straightening forks when Raven’s voice comes from behind him. 

“What’s up with you?” 

Charles turns, smiling at his sister, “Good evening to you, too, Raven.” 

Her expression is somewhat hard to read, set at a place between confusion and disbelief and contented. “You’re acting weird,” she tells him. 

“How so?” Charles pulls a face. 

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head. “Where were you earlier? Hank called and Anne said you’d gone out.”

“I was just on a walk,” he lies, because somehow he doesn’t picture this to be the moment suitable for telling her that he’s having a somewhat illicit affair with their father’s grad student. 

“And you were out yesterday, too,” she continues. 

“I’m not allowed to go out?” He laughs. “Weren’t you just telling me a few weeks ago that I needed to get out more often?” 

“Wandering around in the forest like a fairy isn’t exactly what I meant,” she says, and Charles shifts a little on his feet. “Are you spending -- is it Moira?”

“No,” Charles answers too quickly, “no, no. It’s -- why would it have anything to do with Moira?”

Raven frowns and shrugs, “I don’t know, you’re the one that kissed her.”

Charles’ shoulders sag and he sighs, shaking his head. “Did she tell you that?” He asks. “What -- how do you know that?”

“I saw her out a few days ago and she was asking about you,” Raven answers, crossing her arms over her chest. “Just more proof you’re acting weird.” 

“I’m perfectly fine, thank you for asking, Raven,” Charles tells her pointedly. Raven stays where she is, her eyebrows raised, and Charles returns to setting out silverware. It isn’t until dinner when Charles giggles at something that Erik says that a stony look of realization falls over her face. 

“Should I bring dessert out?” Anne asks. 

“Charles and I will get it,” Raven answers, pushing her chair back unceremoniously. “Thank you, Anne.” 

Charles is pulled out of his and Erik’s eye contact by his name being spoken, turning to his sister with an expression of utter confusion. “What?” He asks. 

Raven doesn’t say anything, just pushes his chair back with much more grace than Raven had managed and follows after her. He doesn’t even need to bother shutting the kitchen door because Raven shuts it immediately after him, looking at him with bewilderment. 

“Charles,” she hisses, and he feels like an animal that’s caught itself in a trap. “Please tell me --” 

“We’re not doing anything wrong,” he says quickly. 

“He is seven years older than you and you’re eye-fucking him at the dinner table!” She counters quietly. 

“It isn’t like that,” Charles responds just as quickly. “It -- it isn’t some sick fetish thing. He’s not like that.” 

Raven covers her face with her hands and takes a few deep breaths. “He’s dad’s grad student,” she says behind her palms. “And he is seven years older than you.” 

“He likes me,” Charles tells her earnestly. “He’s kind, and he’s smart and sweet and he understands me.” 

“You’re not serious,” she tilts her head back. “This -- you can’t be.” 

Charles swallows and feels his cheeks heat in a feeling that is distinctly not pleasant. “We’re not doing anything we should be ashamed of,” he repeats. 

“How are you just… you’re smarter than this, Charles.” 

“He likes me,” he reiterates. “And -- and it’s my life. You’re the one who was so convinced I was wasting away, just letting things happen to me and never acting back, so maybe this is how I act back.” 

“He is going to break your heart,” Raven tells him slowly, “whatever you think is going to come from this --” 

“Well, it’s my heart to be broken,” Charles tells her, his chest swelling. She doesn’t know the first thing about them, or about Erik. “I choose what and who to give myself to, Raven, not you. Maybe if you weren’t so dedicated to playing with Hank and Azazel, you’d be able to see true feelings when you see them.” He picks up the tart stand and brushes past her, pulling the door open and heading back to the table. 

He tries not to look too much at Erik for the remainder of the meal and when everything is finished, he announces to his family that he’s not feeling well and he’s going to head to bed early. His mother kisses his cheek and tells him to feel better. 

Charles tries not to let the conversation get to him. Raven doesn’t understand their relationship, that much he knows -- but he also knows how naive that sounds, and Charles has never considered himself naive. He tries to read, he tries to sleep, he tries even to write but nothing can hold his attention. 

Some time -- it must be hours by Charles’ estimation -- later, there’s a knock at his door. He thinks about responding, but it might be Raven, so he doesn’t. If she wants to be rude and presumptuous, she can suffer through his cold shoulder. Despite his silence, the door opens a few inches and Erik’s head comes through. 

Charles pushes himself to sit up in his bed. “Erik,” he swallows, “come in.” 

Now faced with his lover, Charles feels a touch more shame. Running to his room like a child to hide isn’t exactly the idea of maturity that he’s looking to show Erik. 

Erik shuts the door gently and steps inside. Charles is grateful that he doesn’t ask anything, just finds a spot on the bed and Charles scoots over, wrapping his arms around Erik’s neck. The other man wastes no time pulling him into his lap and holding him. “Is it possible,” Erik’s voice is feather-light, “that I pushed too far today?”

His response is like a strike of lightning, immediate and fierce. “No,” he answers. “No, no, Erik. Nothing like that, I… I loved our time together today, I always love spending time with you.”

“What’s the matter, then, schatz?” Erik kisses his head gently. “Anything. You can tell me, I don’t want you to be scared.” 

Charles waits to respond, his fingers lightly running through the short strands of hair at the base of his head. “Do you think what we’re doing is wrong?” His voice, too, is gentle. 

Erik takes Charles’ hand and holds it over his heart. “No,” he answers with a slight shake of his head. “Not in the slightest, not… not in any way.” 

He shifts closer to Erik’s neck and Erik pulls him in tighter. “What -- what about what everyone says, you know, about… the gay plague, a-and… and that this is God’s punishment, and --” 

Charles is typically very, very strong in his beliefs that the church is not the end of all thought. He had come to terms with his attraction to men in spite of all the horrible things he heard, his father did his best to teach him that just because the Bible said one thing didn’t mean it was the truth -- but his confidence only brought him so far. He’d seen things, terrible things, just -- the way that newspapers talked about gay people and the things that were happening and now with how Raven had reacted to something he thought so highly of… he wasn’t sure what to think. 

He knew his feelings for Erik were real. Something so intense and moving had to be real, there was no way that this was all some delusion. Raven had seemed so horrified and disgusted though, but their love was no different than the love she could feel. If anything, he thought, it had to be stronger. They had to hide theirs. 

“Charles,” Erik mutters, “For as brilliant as you are, I do wonder if sometimes you think too much.” He brings Charles’ hand up to kiss his knuckles lightly, and Charles sits up a touch to fix Erik with a miserable expression. “‘There is no God any more divine than yourself’,” Erik promises. 

“Unfortunately, _ Laws of Creation _ can’t fix everything,” Charles responds and presses his head against Erik’s neck. From where Erik is holding his hand against Erik’s chest, Charles reaches out a finger and touches the Star of David charm on his necklace. 

“Raven knows,” Charles admits after a long moment. 

“How do you mean she knows?”

“She said you were  _ eye-fucking _ me at the dinner table.”

“I thought the eye-fucking was mutual.” 

Charles can’t help but scoff, “It’s the only kind of fucking you’ll do to me, it seems.” He tries not to sound so bitter. 

“Did she say anything?” Erik asks, ignoring his comment completely. 

“She just… said that I was smarter than to get involved,” he swallows thickly, shaking his head. “But I don’t think I’m a fool at all.”

Erik hums and rocks him gently. “For what it’s worth,” he starts, “I don’t think you’re anything close to a fool, either.”

“Would you stay with me tonight?” Charles asks and he hates how young he sounds. 

Erik takes a deep breath, then rubs his hand up and down Charles’ back. “Of course,” he promises. “I’ll try not to wake you when I leave to run.” 

Charles doesn’t respond. He snuggles in further and holds on tight, and after a few moments, Erik lies them down and makes sure Charles is warm beneath the sheets. 

Raven must do some meddling because Hank comes by the next morning when Charles is in the library. 

“It’s good to see you,” Charles laughs, marking his spot in his biology text. “Raven’s allowed you off your leash?”

“I just wanted to say hi,” Hank grins, leaning over to see what Charles had been reading. “I haven’t seen you in ages.” 

“Ravens been keeping you all to herself,” Charles shrugs again. “She told me you two went to a museum recently?”

“Just the Bodleian,” Hank nods. “There were a few reading rooms that weren’t so busy, and --” 

“I don’t think I want to know,” Charles laughs. “Did you see anything interesting?”

“There were some texts I looked through, and I finally got to look at the Douce Manuscripts, the ones in the room next to the Franz Kafka stuff?”

“Franz Kafka?” Charles asks like he’s been slapped in the face. 

“Yeah,” Hank nods. “Did you know one of the reasons that Douce left the British Museum was because it got too cold in the winter? He seriously wrote that on his resignation letter.”

Charles loves Hank, truly, he does, but the information he’s so casually dropped into the conversation can’t be taken lightly. Charles could  _ do _ something with that, and he doesn’t care about what Hank and Raven looked at in Bodleian, he needs to go. 

“Is Raven calling you?” Charles asks, putting on his best confused face. 

“Is she?” Hank turns and looks at the door, silent while he waits for another noise. 

“I swear I just heard someone call your name,” he nods.

“Maybe she’s done getting ready,” Hank figures, then gives Charles a little wave. “Well, I’ll see you around. Maybe, like, lunch and talking about heptahelical receptors?” 

Charles relaxes back into his seat and nods. “Yeah, of course. Whenever you’re free.”

Hank smiles at him again, then heads out to go find Raven. Charles marks his page and rushes to the door, opening it just a little so he can watch Hank retreat down the stairs. Charles hurries across the hall and lets himself into Erik’s room. He had assumed that Erik would be down the hall with his father, but he’s surprised to see Erik half-naked and damp standing in his room. 

“Come in, Charles,” Erik tells him, voice ripe with sarcasm.

“Would you like to go to the library with me?” Charles kicks the door shut behind him, brushes past Erik to his room, and then returns a moment later with a cardigan. “I think there’s something there you would like.” 

Charles has to suffer through the view of Erik putting his shirt on, but then Erik is running a hand through his dampened hair. “Sure,” he answers. “If that’s what you’d like to do today.” 

He often feels incredibly inclined to hold Erik’s hand as they walk through the city, but he knows better than to try such a thing. Erik tells him his father had to attend to some other work matters and let Erik go early, and Charles tells him he’s glad that happened. Locating the reading room that Hank had talked about is easy, Charles passes it all the time, he’d just… never thought to stop and take a look. 

“I realized where I’d heard Kafka’s name before,” Charles grins.

Erik gets a contented, proud little look on his face as he realizes just what the documents are. Charles feels it too -- he can’t keep his eyes off of Erik’s face, even as Erik reads over the pages in their traditional German. He gets to stick close to his side, too, allowing Erik to translate for him. They spend hours in there, poring over each document and discussing its implications, what it might mean, how it could possibly relate to his other works. 

“Tell me something in German,” Charles demands, pressed against Erik’s side. 

Erik regards him for a moment, seemingly thinking quite deeply about what to tell him. “Ich liebe Dich.”

“No,” Charles protests, “like, how to say something.” 

“What would you like to know?” Erik cocks his head. 

“Tell me how to introduce myself.”

“Say hallo, or guten tag,” Erik tells him. “And then ich bin Charles.” 

“Guten tag,” Charles attempts, “ich bin Charles.” 

Erik grins widely and teases, “It sounds funny with your accent.” 

Charles blushes pink and bumps his shoulder into Erik. “I think  _ your _ accent sounds funny,” he lies as if he wouldn’t let Erik talk him to sleep every night over and over. “Have you come down to the gardens yet?”

Erik shakes his head. “No, not yet.” 

“This is a shortcut,” Charles informs him with amour propre, “it’s especially useful when you’re trying to outrun a snowstorm.” 

“Does that happen to you often?” Erik muses. 

“More often than I’d like to admit. It’s one of my favorite places on campus, but it’s really so cold most of the year I don’t get the chance to enjoy it properly. I’m excited to show you,” Charles smiles, leading the two of them up to the metal gate. He reaches through the bars to slide the bolt out of place but finds a padlock in place to prevent him to move it. “Oh,” he says a little dejectedly. “That’s not usually there.” 

Charles turns and looks back up the path they’d come from. At least the weather was decent, he supposed. 

“Isn’t it a public garden?” Erik asks, and Charles nods.    
  


“I’ve never seen it closed before,” he admits. 

Erik slips his hand through the bars and chuckles. “Charles, darling,” he says and pulls the lock free. “It’s open.” 

Charles scowls at the lock in Erik’s hand while Erik opens up the gate. “It was locked,” Charles tries uselessly as he joins Erik in walking through. 

“It must have been just stuck closed,” Erik dismisses, nodding Charles down the path. “Shall we?” 

It occurs to Charles that a great deal of the time they spend with one another falls into three categories. Walking, talking, and outdoors. Usually, all three of them. It isn’t at all that he minds, he would spend any time he could with Erik, any time at all. It also occurs to him that they’re now approaching the dawn of Erik’s trip. Nine weeks and here they were, five weeks in. 

Often, Charles finds himself feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt that he’s not being honest with Erik by keeping his telepathy from him. It isn’t that Charles thinks that Erik would react poorly -- Erik has done nothing but establish that he has a very kind heart -- it’s simply that he’s so scared of what Erik will think of his ability. He’s so guarded about his past and his feelings outside of Charles that… Charles doesn’t know how he’d respond. 

Similarly, he continues to wonder why Erik won’t fuck him already. Having Erik touch him at all is leaps and bounds better than it had been weeks ago, but he craves Erik so much. He wants to feel Erik inside and all around him, he wants Erik to have every part of him he possibly can. Erik isn’t shy about touching him and is quite a willing participant in Charles’s exploration of sex. Anything Charles seems to want outside of penis-in-ass, Erik seems more than happy to give him. It’s fantastic, Charles hasn’t had so many mind-blowing orgasms in his life, and Erik frequently complains about Charles’ seemingly endless libido making him feel much older than he is. It’s gotten to the point where they can hardly keep their hands off each other in private, for sexual reasons or not. Erik likes to keep Charles within arms reach and Charles has become accustomed to slipping a hand beneath Erik’s shirt whenever possible to feel the planes of muscle he’d decorated with love bites the night before. 

It’s what he finds himself thinking about while he’s holed up in the attic on his own. No one is going to bother him up here -- the third story hardly ever gets used, much less explored deeply enough that someone might come across him. He brought his book and two unusually large plums from the tree on their property, and he lies against an old, ratty mattress that was put up here in storage. The book has proven itself useless in distracting him and is lying dejectedly beside the mattress as he turns one of the plums in his hands. He thinks of Erik’s first time touching him, how Erik had picked him a handful of cherries and found so much amusement in feeding them to him. 

A plum’s shape, he thinks, is not unlike a cherry’s. They share a similar texture, soft flesh and an almost waxy skin, a cleft and one dimpled end where it attached to the stem and one tapered end. He drags his finger from the tapered end along the cleavage, then into the divot. A thought comes into his head that makes his stomach squirm. 

Working quickly as to not allow shame or doubt to sneak up on him, Charles digs his fingers into the fruit. Sweet juice drips down his hand, rivulets making their way down his arm as his fingers wrap around the pit and pull it free from the flesh of the fruit. He drops it beside the mattress and gives his hand an unceremonious and purposeless suck to clean it up. Using the same hand, Charles pulls his shorts down his thighs somewhat and takes a deep, grounding breath. 

The first few strokes take some getting used to. Fucking a fruit isn’t something he’d ever imagined doing, so he’s not too sure if weird is an appropriate way to describe it. It isn’t cold, but it is distinctly un-warm, at least at first. He still has no baseline to compare it too beyond the feeling of fingering himself or Erik, but to say that the soft texture of the fruit around his cock feels bad would be a lie. Charles finds himself liking it more than he could have pictured, grinding up into it while his hands move the fruit up and down his shaft, letting the juice leak down his balls and between his legs. 

A breathless whine escapes his mouth and though he hasn’t masturbated since Erik first touched him -- why would he need to when he can just beg Erik until he relents -- this feels so much better than his masturbation beforehand. Charles has to clamp a hand over his mouth as he finishes himself off, relishing in the wet sounds of the plum and the feeling of coming in it. 

Chest heaving, Charles can hardly find it in himself to open his own eyes. The sight of his own semen… mingling now with the bruised flesh of the plum and the juice is a sight that mostly confuses him -- and frustrates him, because if Erik would just fuck him, Charles wouldn’t be here using stone fruits to masturbate. 

“Christ,” Charles hears himself mutter, and he carefully sets the plum aside and uses the edge of a sheet to clean himself up a little, then holds his hands over his eyes and wills himself not to think of Erik. 

It’s always Erik. Charles isn’t sure he’s had a thought to himself since Erik arrived, and in honesty… he isn’t sure what he’s going to do with Erik’s impending departure. He has all of twenty-six days left, he counted, and then their perfect little bubble will simply disappear. Erik will no longer be there to watch from his window, or brushing his teeth for minty kisses before breakfast, or kissing his neck from behind while he tries to read, or a hand to hold as they stroll through the property, or available to coax into swimming with him or there at all. Erik will leave and go back to New York and Charles will be left here to look at the spaces Erik once occupied. 

He doesn’t even notice he’s fallen asleep until he feels a mouth on his stomach, kissing lightly over sticky smears of dried plum juice. “Erik,” he breathes and then lets out a moan. “How did you find me?”

Erik hums in response and pulls Charles’ shorts out of the way. “I’m just that attuned to you,” he answers with a cheeky smile and then dips his head to wrap around the head of Charles’ cock. 

Charles lets out a throaty sound as Erik’s tongue swirls around the head of his cock, gently licking down his shaft while sucking insistently before he suddenly pulls off. “You taste sweet.”

“Huh?” Charles responds, squinting down at him. 

“You taste sweet,” Erik repeats, “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Charles responds too quickly, and he adjusts his shirt where his chest is picking up some color. 

Erik’s grin widens. “What did you do?” He asks. “I know you -- oh,” Erik’s gaze falls on the plum and he reaches for it. Charles does too, though he doesn’t know what he’d do with it if he even managed to grab it first. “What’s this?” he asks, his voice teasing. 

As jovial as his tone might be, Charles’ face flames up violently. “Stop,” he pleads gently. 

“Why would I stop?” Erik asks. 

“It’s sick,” Charles says, then swallows. It had seemed like a fine idea at the time, but… try as he might, shame wasn’t easy to outrun. “I’m sick.” 

“If only there were more sick people like you,” Erik responds, easy as ever, as if fucking stone fruits was something just slightly taboo. 

He brings it towards his mouth as if to take a bite of it, and Charles sits up and tries to hold his arm away. “Stop,” Charles pleads again, “Erik, don’t.” 

“Charles,” he says back, easily pushing Charles’ arms away. 

“Erik,” Charles laments, “Erik, please, stop.”

His request falls on deaf ears as Erik sinks his teeth into the plum, taking big, greedy bites of the fruit and moaning like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted as he does so. Charles watches with a horrific interest, red as a rose, while juice and semen drip down Erik’s forearm. Watching the intensity with which Erik faces something Charles had felt so shameful of, how unafraid his lover is to keep all of him, Charles feels overwhelmed to be soon facing the loss of someone who has become a part of him. 

“Charles,” his tone is sympathetic as Charles hides behind his hands, quickly being pulled into Erik’s chest. He feels Erik set the plum down and then another arm wraps around him. “I only meant to tease you, darling,” he explains quietly. 

“I don’t want you to go,” Charles sobs.

Even if there were anything for Erik to say that might make things better, it wouldn’t change things. Erik will go and Charles will stay and be alone, and in truth, he will probably all the fool his sister thinks he is. Erik doesn’t pity him, though, and thus he spares Charles empty words that will make him feel good at the moment. Nothing, Charles thinks, can fix things. Erik’s arms, warm and strong and lightly stroking his back, well, they can make him feel better until Erik has to leave. 

That night when they lie in Charles’ bed, Erik’s finger draws feather-light patterns over Charles’ features. Across his forehead and down his nose and atop his lips, and when Charles lifts his jaw to press a kiss to his finger, Erik speaks. 

“Charles,” he whispers. “Listen to me.”

He turns his head ever so slightly to face Erik and blinks at him slowly. Impossible as it may seem, he’s sure his lover has become more beautiful since the first time he saw him climb out from the car in his driveway. 

Erik licks his lips before he speaks in a hushed tone. “‘Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you. That you may be my poem. I whisper with my lips close to your ear. I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you’.”

Poetry can’t save them, Charles thinks, just the same as Erik’s arms can’t and how nothing Charles does can prevent their tragedy. “I love you, too,” he says, and then presses his forehead against Erik’s. “You have all of me.” 

With everything looming over him, Charles finds it no easier to think about things that aren’t Erik. When Anne comes to rouse him from the library because someone is there for him, he doesn’t even think twice about who it might be until he gets down the stairs. 

“Moira,” Charles says, almost as if she’s an apparition, like the concept of Moira standing in their entry hall is too outlandish to believe. 

She smiles and gives him a wave, and Erik emerges from the kitchen with a mug in his hand. 

“Sorry,” Moira apologizes in her same silvery voice, “I didn’t mean to just show up, but I haven’t seen you in town and I wanted to talk to you. Hi, Erik,” she nods politely as he passes. 

“Moira,” Erik greets as floats by the two of them, passing in front of Charles to go up the stairs and presumably back to the study. 

“Yeah,” Charles answers, a beat too late, “sorry, um -- should we take a walk?” 

Their journey takes them off Xavier property, down an old road until they find themselves lying on a grassy hill, eyes turned up at a clear, cornflower sky. Their conversation has lulled -- it hadn’t been anything interesting, just polite chatter until they got to the meat and potatoes of it all. 

“Charles,” Moira says at the same time Charles says her name. 

“Let me go first,” Charles whispers. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to shake the crushing weight on his chest. “I’m in love with Erik.” 

Moira is silent so long he wonders if maybe she’s fallen asleep. He should really say more than that, he should apologize for leading her on and kissing her and using her to get Erik’s attention, but nothing seems to form into sentences. Then, like the crack of a whip, Moira is standing. Not only is she standing, but she’s standing and walking -- no, stomping, storming -- away, back down to road towards the Xavier mansion. 

Charles runs after her, begging her to slow down and listen, but Moira’s gaze is cold, steely as it steers her straight ahead. She’s crying, her eyes red and her make up smeared across her cheeks as she wipes tears from her cheeks. 

“Moira, please,” Charles begs, nearly tripping over his feet to keep up with her, “we had to hide it, please, I know -- I know I’m awful --” 

“No,” she snaps, and stands still, and Charles does actually trip over his own feet. “No, you don’t get to go all self-deprecating on me, to garner sympathy from me, that is  _ not _ what we’re doing.” Her voice is fire, pure frustration in it’s rawest form, and even the way she sniffles sound angry. She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You used me,” she hisses. “You used me and you led me on, and you think that -- you think that you should be ashamed because you’re with a man, but you should be ashamed that you would  _ use _ someone like that,” she seethes. “What did I do to deserve that?”

With that, Moira continues on her path, gravel crunching under her boots, her white skirt swishing with each step. 

Needless to say, when he watches her pedal her bike with a striking sense of anger and determination, her manicured hands white-knuckled on the handlebars, shaped brows knitted together and doe eyes slanted as she passes him with far more speed than necessary. 

Charles rushes up to the library, dropping to his knees to look through a filing cabinet in the far corner of the room. He pulls out the address book and grabs a pen from the cup beside him, then copies down the MacTaggert’s address and furiously begins drafting a letter. Moira can’t get mad at a letter, can she? He doesn’t suspect that she’s running off to flaunt Charles’ dirty laundry around the town, but Charles needs to be sure. Exposure of this could ruin Erik’s career and Charles’ future, it could get them hurt. 

While his head is down, Erik walks into the room. His head is in a book, speaking quietly to himself while he walks to the desk in the center of the room. He sets the book down and pulls a leaf of paper over, then raises his hand over his shoulder towards where Charles is. Charles, for a moment, thinks that maybe Erik is beckoning him, or telling him to stay there, and a wave of panic falls over Charles at the thought of him telling Erik that Moira knows. 

None of those things happen, though, and instead, the pen in Charles’ hand wiggles its way free and flies through the air to find itself in Erik’s grip while Erik copies something down. 

“Oh my God,” Charles says, his jaw slack with exhilaration and his eyes wide. “Erik.” 

The sound of Charles’ voice brings Erik’s attention, and the man drops the pen before turning to look at him with a similar expression, but a very different emotion behind his eyes. “Charles.” 

“How did you -- you --” Charles stutters, pointing to the air between them. 

“No,” Erik says firmly, and then swallows. “I didn’t.”

“Yes,” Charles insists with glee, “yes, you -- you did, I watched you! It flew out of my hand, you did that!” 

“I did nothing,” Erik persists, and Charles recognizes the specific variety of fear in his eyes. 

Charles raises two fingers to his temple and insists. “ _ Yes _ ,  _ you did _ .” 

For a moment nothing else happens. Erik looks at him dumbfounded, shaking his head slightly. Charles swallows. “Erik?” He asks, this time with his mouth. 

“You were in my head,” Erik says slowly, still blanketed in disbelief. “How did you do that?”

“You have your tricks,” Charles tries. His tone is slow, even, unoffensive -- as though he’s worried he might spook Erik. “I have mine. I -- I’m like you.”

Erik’s eyes are hazy and unfocused, and though he’s looking at Charles he may as well be looking at something a thousand miles away. “I thought I was alone.” 

Charles lets out a breathless laugh and a gentle smile falls over his lips. “You’re not alone,” Charles promises. “Erik,” he repeats, “you are not alone.”

Erik returns to Charles’ father and admits that he can feel a headache coming on while Charles quickly finishes the letter. Charles sprints it out to the mailbox to be brought to the MacTaggert’s in the morning, then races back up to his bedroom. Little else gets done for the rest of the day as they explore one another’s abilities, including guessing games and Charles throwing things made of metal at his lover just to watch him catch him with his mind. 

“It all makes sense now,” Charles admits with his head on Erik’s chest. “The croquet frame and the padlock at the garden, that was you showing off.”

“And your door,” Erik adds casually. 

“My door?” Charles asks. “What on earth did -- Erik,” he laughs with realization.

“I wanted to see you,” he admits without even a trace of shame. “It worked.”

“You had a crush on me,” Charles purrs, sitting up and turning over to look at him. He holds Erik’s chin lightly in his fingers, then presses a kiss gently to his lips. 

“For some reason,” Erik rolls his eyes and grins. 

_ For some reason _ , Charles repeats into Erik’s mind and kisses him deeply.  _ You’re so handsome _ .

Ever the romantic, Erik’s voice comes back clearly in his head. ‘ _ All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain _ .’

Charles goes down to dinner alone, on account of keeping up with Erik’s story, and when the meal is finished he rushes back upstairs to see him with a small plate. “Eat without your hands,” Charles demands excitedly. 

He looks like a child on Christmas with the way he watches Erik lift the fork and knife with his mind and feed himself. “You’re incredible,” he says, over and over. “Absolutely brilliant, stunning, amazing, marvelous, spectacular --” 

“Have you become a thesaurus?” Erik teases, setting his plate aside. 

“Is it so hard to believe that I find the things you do breathtaking?” Charles asks, and Erik pulls him in to cuddle. 

“Mm,” Erik hums, “I think you’re quite breathtaking as well. I’ve never met someone quite like you, Charles. Will you excuse me if I quote more Whitman at you?” 

Charles giggles against Erik’s neck, then speaks. “I’ll allow it. 

“Are you listening?” Erik asks him. 

“Of course.” 

“No,” Erik says, “here.” He brings Charles’ hand up to touch his temple, and Charles feels a shiver at the invitation. The fact that Erik was… that Erik wanted him there, in his mind, that he felt comfortable enough and trusted him enough to let him into the most intimate parts of himself. That he trusted that Charles wasn’t meddling around without permission. 

_ Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch, _ Erik quotes, and Charles feels butterflies erupting in his stomach, feels his heart swell with a suffocating, inescapable fondness and love for the man wrapped around him. 

Charles takes a little while to respond. “You love me?” Charles asks, even though he knows the answer. 

“Yes.” His answer comes solidly, a known fact with no room for argument or debate. 

Charles licks his lips, and then whispers against the skin of Erik’s neck, “Prove it.” 

Erik pulls away from him now to look him in the eyes. He pushes himself up onto an elbow, once again holding himself steady above Charles. “Can I kiss you?” He asks. 

“Yes, please,” Charles answers immediately, pressing up to kiss Erik with all the power he has. 

Erik makes Charles wait several times. Charles has the tendency, it seems, to push himself. He thinks he wants more and more and more and Erik is the one who has to slow him down as so not to hurt himself. Not that Erik can exactly blame him with how patient Charles has been. He whined and moaned about Erik’s refusal to fuck him, but all the same, Charles was sure Erik had his reasons.

There’s nothing that compares. For Charles, Erik is his first. His first everything. His first love and his first time and his first everything in between -- and for Erik, Charles seems to be his only. At this moment he can’t see a future where he loves anyone more than the boy beneath him, the boy with the sweaty skin and his head thrown back and his hand over his mouth to keep quiet, the boy raking his nails across the skin of Erik’s back in ecstasy. 

The roll of Erik’s hips slow and he pulls away from where he’d been sucking a necklace of marks against Charles’ chest. “‘Touch me’,” Erik says, and Charles pants loudly and runs his hands through Erik’s hair. 

“Where?” He asks. 

“No,” Erik tells him. “‘ _ Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, be not afraid of my bod _ y’,” he says. 

“Leaves of Grass,” Charles pants as a smile blooms on his face. “I love you.” 

“I love you,” Erik repeats back at him, and rolls his hips deeply into Charles’ body. Charles shudders in his arms and arches his back. 

“I’m -- I’m quite close,” he admits, and Erik reaches for his hand. He presses a kiss to Charles’ knuckles then lifts his hand to rest over his temple. 

Charles looks up at him for a moment, once again awe-stricken that this man exists. This man is real, he exists, and he is Charles’ just as much as Charles is his. 

It feels a bit like falling, truly, moving into Erik’s mind. It’s terrifying and exhilarating and a complete rush of endorphins as the both of them climax. The combined feelings of Erik’s mind -- this bright, brilliant feeling of nuance and depth and complexities that are simply indescribable -- and his orgasm have Charles utterly overwhelmed in a matter of seconds. 

Before he can truly process it all, he feels himself blinking awake, and the feeling of someone wiping his chest down with a bit of cloth. It’s Erik, dirtying his shirt with the mess of Charles’ release before he throws it to the floor. 

“You wore that shirt on the first day you got here,” he says distantly. 

Erik looks at him for a moment, then grins and leans down to kiss him. “So nice of you to join me again.”

Charles makes a noise of vague confusion and turns onto his side to stretch. His ass is sore, but the good kind of sore. 

“You’ve been catatonic for the past half hour,” Erik asks. “It took me fifteen minutes to wake up, but -- I thought I’d broken you.” 

Charles shuts his eyes once more and takes a deep breath. “Your mind, Erik,” Charles says in amazement, “I -- I’ve never dreamed someone could be that incredible, never in a thousand years would I expect it to be like that.”

Erik looks at him, that same intense gaze that makes Charles feel utterly transparent. “You know all of me now,” he says and combs a hand through Charles’ hair. 

He reaches out and catches Erik’s hand in his own, then kisses his palm. “Thank you for sharing that with me, Erik.” Charles reaches and tugs his arm, “Lie with me.” 

Erik listens without protest. Charles reaches and cards his fingers through Erik’s hair fondly. “Your mind was beautiful,” Charles repeats. “I know you don’t think so, but… I’ve never imagined anything like that. Would you let me do it again?” 

Erik turns his face into Charles’ hand and presses a light kiss to Charles’s palm. “Yes,” he finally relents, his voice gruff and raw. 

“Thank you,” Charles presses a light kiss to Erik’s lips then touches his forehead against Erik’s. 

Going through someone’s mind will never be a describable feat, Charles knows as much. He hasn’t been through many minds -- it happened far more frequently when he was young but he can mostly control it now -- but it doesn’t take much experience to know that the raw feeling of Erik’s is unlike any that could ever exist. He feels as though he lives beside him, watching memories of Hanukkah with his mother in their apartment, always moving from place to place to place, how strong his heart and his passion is, the rage he feels at those who have tried to keep him down, the love he feels now for Charles. A memory in particular sticks out. 

Erik must be fourteen or so, maybe a bit younger, and he stands out in front of a house with his head to the sky. All of the sudden he’s yelling for his mother in German, pointing at the sky before running inside. His mother abandons her place at the kitchen with a brilliant smile -- Charles knows now where he gets that smile from -- and joins Erik by the window. He speaks to her in German but Charles still understands as he tells her that he saw the first star. She lights a match for him and allows him to pass the flame to the candle on the menorah, then wraps an arm around him and kisses his head before ushering him towards the table to be served. 

Charles wipes his cheek as he pulls away, blinking away the others that threaten to fall. Erik does the same, looking just a bit haunted.

“What did you just do to me?” He asks roughly. 

“I… I think I was looking at your memories,” Charles admits. Erik had given him permission to look, but he can’t be sure that he hasn’t overstepped somehow. 

It takes a beat before Erik responds, doing so after a light kiss to Charles’ mouth once more. “I didn’t know I still had that.” 

Though the days dwindle, the pair don’t seem to run out of things to do. Charles, no different than what Erik has expected, is utterly insatiable. Any time he can, it seems, he’s jumping Erik’s bones. Charles needs him any way he can get him, over the bathroom counter or in the shower or on the floor, against the wall or in bed with one of Erik’s hands pulling his hair and the other pressed between his shoulder blades. That isn’t to say that they don’t spend plenty of quality time together clothes, reading and talking and wandering still through the city. There’s plenty of exploration to be done with one another’s abilities and sometimes they exist in silence, speaking only in their minds while they wander about or cuddle. Erik uses it to his advantage, even, thinking the most explicit things he can while at breakfast or dinner, when Charles is stuck beside his parents -- it’s through this that they discover excessive use of his powers cause nosebleeds. 

It doesn’t seem that Moira has elected to share Charles’ secret with anyone else. No one else seems to know, there isn’t a scandal that runs through town, and while he had never expected her to air his business like that, he’s thankful that he was right. 

And just like with all good things, the days fly by like seconds. It’s only two days until Erik leaves when he finds himself with his sister and parents gathered for breakfast -- Erik is still in bed. Obviously, Charles had worn him out last night. 

“Anne, could you remind Erik when he wakes that he should go down to the train station and collect his ticket early?” His mother asks. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How longs he in London for?” Raven asks casually.

“A couple of days, I think. Just before he leaves.” 

“Oh,” she says, and picks up her spoon to crack into her soft-boiled egg. “What about Charles?”

Charles looks up from his toast and gives her a look, one that begs her not to do this. 

Charles’ father laughs dryly and looks down at Charles from across the table. “Well, what about him?” 

“Didn’t you say there were a bunch of exhibits at the museums down there that you wanted to see?” Raven turns to look at him this time. 

“Yes,” Charles answers, blinking in confusion. 

“So,” Raven shrugs and gives herself a bite of egg. “Why don’t you send Charles down with him to play tour guide? Erik can do whatever it is he needs to do and Charles can go see his museum stuff and I’ll pick him up from the train station when he comes come.” 

Charles’ parents exchange a look. “Well,” his father shakes his head. “Charles, I suppose if you’re comfortable with that…”

“Yes,” Charles answers far too quickly. “I mean -- yes, I’ve been waiting all year to go back to the Natural History Museum, I’d be happy to show Erik around some if I could go.” 

His mother strokes through his hair lightly. “Well, pack your things, and maybe Erik and you can go down to the station together.” 

Raven, as she has done every day this summer, heads out almost immediately after breakfast. 

“Raven!” Charles calls after her, “Wait!”

His sister doesn’t exactly look thrilled that he’s stopped her, but she waits for him nonetheless. “What’s up?”

“Thank you,” is all he says. He isn’t sure what she has to gain out of this, why she’s had a change of heart about he and Erik being together, but… but he won’t take it for granted. “You didn’t need to do that.” 

“I don’t think you know what you’re doing,” Raven establishes in true big sister fashion. “But you were right. It is your heart, and it is up to you who you give it to. I might think he’s kind of scummy for messing with dad’s trust but I figure I’m not really in a position to judge him for that, either.”

“He loves me, Raven,” Charles tells her with all the conviction in the world.

She nods. “Good,” she says, and even manages a little smile. “If you’re happy, then… then so am I.”

Charles nods. “I am.” 

Raven nods at him again, and then turns and continues walking down the driveway.

Erik is similarly excited about the news, looking forward to being somewhere with a little more anonymity. Charles tells him all that he can about London, promising him that they’re going to have a fantastic time. Erik tells him that anywhere he goes with Charles is fantastic. 

“Here,” his mother insists at the train station, pressing a stack of bills into Charles’ hand, “For whatever you need, darling, a room or food, whatever, and -- and you have your checkbook, right?”

“Yes, mother,” Charles tries not to sound too indignant while she presses kisses to his cheeks. “Mum, the train,” he laughs, trying to pull away. 

“Right! Right, say goodbye to your sister,” she insists, passing Charles off to Raven so that she can give Erik a proper goodbye. 

“Call me when you need me to come to get you,” she says, “you know who to call if I’m not home, right?”

Charles nods, then pulls her into a hug. “Thank you,” he whispers again. 

“Have fun,” she says back, squeezing him tightly. “And don’t get in too much trouble without me.” 

It turns out that a two-hour train ride next to your favorite person doesn’t feel much like two hours at all. Their trip to their hotel is easy enough -- one bed, please, Erik asks while Charles dawdles and tries not to act suspicious. Their room is perfect, but then again, Charles would think any room with Erik is perfect. 

The first night, Erik takes them to dinner at a fancy restaurant, where Charles proceeds in the act of getting trashed in public. Erik laughs at him while he drinks glasses of wine, laughs again when he makes a face at the taste of Erik’s brandy, and laughs some more while he dances with Charles in the empty streets. Well, nearly empty, seeing as some cars do speed by them blaring their horns in the wet, muggy London streets. 

Charles spins in circles as he stumbles down the streets, then turns into an alley. Erik is just a step behind him, catching Charles in his arms before he can slam his head into the brick wall.

“Oh, Erik,” Charles mewls, dragging his hands up Erik’s chest to wrap around his neck. “But we’re in public, darling.”

Despite this, Charles has no problems with kissing Erik’s neck noisily. 

“You’re going to make yourself sick, spinning around like that,” Erik laughs lightly, then pulls away just enough to make Charles stop licking at his neck. 

“I thought you said you liked it when I was sick,” Charles pouts. 

“Not this kind of sick, I’d --” Erik is cut off by a dramatic gasp. 

“Do you hear that?” Charles’ hands are on Erik’s biceps now, his eyes like saucers. “Erik, Erik! Do -- can you hear that?” 

Just as soon as he’d heard the music, Charles is ducking out from Erik’s grip and running down the street towards the source -- the source being a car parked on the road corner. A couple of people mill about, one lady dancing as her friends smoke cigarettes. 

Charles doesn’t bother with an invite, instead running up to her and reaching for her hand. Her laugh is loud and dramatic as she takes his hand and lets him spin her, and for a moment they’re dancing on the promenade with Big Ben behind them. Erik wishes he had a camera. 

Unfortunately, Charles’ dancing doesn’t last long. He swings too hard and stumbles over to a bush, heaving up the watery contents of his stomach into a bush. 

(Erik only laughs a little before he runs to help.)

“Let’s get you in bed, hm?” Erik asks a bleary Charles, one arm under his shoulders as he drags him back to the hotel. They stop at a few water fountains to help Charles rinse his mouth out, and each time he complains about the water being too cold. 

“You’re quite funny when you’re drunk,” Erik tells him as he helps Charles down some stairs. 

“I’m always quite funny, darling,” Charles slurs back, then stumbles on the last step and Erik is quick to catch him. He decides they’re due for a break, just a block or two from their hotel, and the street is deserted. Erik backs him against a wall and Charles slips his hands underneath Erik’s shirt to rub at his bare back. 

“How do you say,” Charles asks against his neck, “‘please fuck me’ in German?”

Erik snorts at the question. “Darling, you hardly have a grasp on English at the moment.”

“Just tell me,” Charles whines, and boldly grinds against him. Erik has to look up and down the street to make sure that no one has wandered out. 

“Bitte fick mich.”

Charles tries to say it -- quite unsuccessfully so -- and Erik laughs at him quietly again. “I love your accent,” he says quietly, pressing his nose into Charles’ hair. “I’m going to miss --” 

“Please don’t,” Charles interrupts. He’s drunk, but -- he’s not drunk enough to forget that this all ends soon. “Please.” 

Erik holds him tight against his chest in the streetlight. He stops counting the seconds and breathes, exists here and only here at this moment with a drunk teenage boy in a city that doesn’t know them. When the moment passes, Erik takes Charles’ face in his hands and kisses him, deep and loving and proud.

“Let’s get you to bed,” Erik whispers after, and then leads Charles down the street. 

When Erik finally leaves, Charles doesn’t cry. He feels numb as it happens, simply existing while time travels all too fast around him. It feels far too sterile for the intimate ways they know one another. He says nothing. Erik says nothing. They hug. Erik boards his flight and looks over his shoulder.

Erik boards his plane and Charles thinks of their hug. He thinks of the way Erik smelled and his strong arms wrapped around Charles’ shoulders and his nose in Charles’ hair and Charles’ hands on his back, gripping his shirt in silent pleas of  _ please do not leave me, I would do anything to follow you, I would give anything for you to stay, I’ve forgotten how to exist without you as a part of me. _

Part of him had wanted to tease, to ask where his final Whitman quote was, but his throat feels as though it’s been attacked by a swarm of bees, tight and dry and hot. He knows that if he opens his mouth, even for just a goodbye, that he will cry, and furthermore that he will look every bit the boy he is. It isn’t the last view of him that he wants Erik to have, so he stays silent. 

Charles leaves the airport and goes to the train station. He does not cry on the way there, or on the ride home, and his first tear shed comes locked in a phone booth outside the Oxford train station. 

“Raven?” He asks into the receiver, his voice cracking. “Could you come to pick me up, please?”

His sister must be a saint, he thinks, because she is silent as the night when Charles climbs in. It feels sickly and awful to be without him, and it has since their hug ended and Charles no longer knew when their next touch would come -- if it would ever come. Being home feels like he’s drowning as wave after wave of heartsickness and yearning pummels him, tearing him to shreds with each second that passes. It feels wrong to see the places Erik previously occupied and to know that he’s somewhere else, somewhere Charles isn’t. 

This can’t be what heartbreak feels like, he thinks. Charles finds it ironic in the most wretched, horrible way that the only person who would know how to make him feel better is leaving. Is left, is gone already. 

When they get home, Raven helps him with his bag and hugs him tightly, and thankfully, doesn’t say a word beyond “Get some rest, okay?”

He doesn’t even want his room back. It’s no longer his. It was theirs, something they shared and existed together within and that is filled with so many raw memories that Charles considers sleeping somewhere else, like on the couch in the den. Or outside, or a mile away, or in a city that Erik has never been to. Anywhere that isn’t here. 

Charles, though, is far too weak and pushes the door open. On his bed, a folded up black turtleneck lies on the duvet under Erik’s copy of  _ The Metamorphosis _ . 

His bag falls to the floor and Charles sits, the mattress sagging beneath his weight. The book is worn and soft as he remembers, and Charles opens the cover to reveal Erik’s handwriting, a feature that had most certainly been absent the last time Charles had read from this novel.

_ I am to wait. I do not doubt I am to meet you again. I am to see to it that I do not lose you. -E _

A week later, Anne pulls him from the library again and Charles is surprised to see that it’s Moira waiting for him once more. 

“How are you?” She asks in greeting, wrapping her arms around him for a tight hug. 

“I’m… I’m well,” he responds, shocked at her kindness. 

“Could we talk?” 

They end up in the garden with mugs of tea. “I know you have to be… unhappy right now.”

Charles says nothing, looking at her with curiosity. 

“And,” Moira’s fingers play trace around the lip of her cup, “I want you to know that I’m not mad at you for what you did.” She glances at him now, then looks back at her tea. “Not at all, really, I -- I love you, Charles.” 

Again, Charles finds himself speechless. 

“I want us to stay friends.” She gives him a smile and a nod, and Charles gives her one back. 

“I’d like that very much,” he admits, pulling her into a hug. “For life.” 

Charles hasn’t ever been more grateful for school to start. In the empty time following Erik’s departure, Charles is a sorry sight for eyes. He’s lethargic and dismal. He reads Erik’s copy of The Metamorphosis more times than he can count and wears his turtleneck every time he can. He misses feeling close to Erik. 

His family goes back to New York and Charles is alone once more. The first night he runs down the halls and screams into pillows and weeps until he makes himself sick. He considers looking up Erik’s number in their address book but doesn’t, as much as he craves to hear Erik’s fruity voice, as much as he would give to have Erik mutter prose to him over a receiver. 

Classes are a welcome distraction. He can throw himself into studies and rather than falling into a restless sleep and dreaming of Erik, he can pass out in the library armchairs over a biology textbook. Talking to others helps, too, but sometimes something someone does reminds him too much of Erik and he’ll find himself biting back tears at an Honors Luncheon or in the middle of a lecture. 

Charles feels selfish for wishing Erik would call or write or give him any sign that Erik still remembers him. Charles loves him so much, even now, that he hates how much one single man has such control over him. An entire ocean apart and he still can’t escape Erik. 

Try as he might, he can’t help but wonder if Erik thinks of him too, or if he’s just a silly boy with a too-big heart who got in too deep. He explored Erik’s mind, though. He knows the love Erik had for him was real and raw and pure and utterly unstoppable, but… Charles knows there’s a reason as to why he hasn’t yet called or written. There has to be. Erik can’t have just… forgotten him, it seems utterly unbelievable. He felt what Charles felt, too. 

Charles gets his answer. It’s late December and Charles has a thick, wooly knit sweater on as he walks towards the dining room to join his family. Just as he passes, the phone rings. He could keep going and wait for Anne or someone else to get it, but he’s right there, within arm’s length, so he picks up the receiver. 

“Xavier house, Charles speaking,” he greets.

“Charles?” The voice on the other end makes his heart stop, and though the call is so long overdue Charles finds himself smiling. 

“Hi,” he responds, breathless and heart pounding. “How are you?” 

“I’m well, Charles, I’m doing good,” Erik responds and it sounds so… so casual. It could have been a day since he left. “How are you?”

“I’m good, fine,” he answers too quickly, too breathy, too giddy. Erik doesn’t respond and a lull pulls the conversation. “I miss you,” Charles relents, glancing down the hallway. 

It’s quite the understatement, but Charles can’t exactly describe how badly it feels like he’s missing his heart on a family line like this. 

Erik takes too long to respond, but his voice sounds genuine. Charles doesn’t think he’d ever lie to him. “I miss you,” a pause, “deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”

Kafka. Charles thinks of their time in the library, secretly holding hands in the Bodleian. He thinks of re-reading The Metamorphosis aloud with his head in Erik’s lap, Erik brushing a gentle hand through his hair while puffing on a cigarette. He thinks of listening to Erik speak in German. 

For a while, Charles just listens to Erik breathe and exist on the other side of the line. It’s a little static-y and crackle-y but when he hasn’t had contact in months, it feels like generosity that Erik is simply letting him hear him stand by the phone. 

“I have some news,” Erik breaks the silence, and Charles’ heart skips a beat. 

_ I’m coming back to Oxford.  _

_ I still love you.  _

_ I’m going to find you and never leave again.  _

“N-news?” Charles asks, and he bites at his lower lip, picking at the skin there. As much as he wants it to be jovial, great news that Charles can celebrate… something tells him this isn’t the case. Erik doesn’t sound the way he would if he were about to tell Charles something as perfect as that. “Oh,” he says, and a cruel sense of realization dawns on him, “you’re getting married, I suppose?”

He would give anything to hear the voice on the other end deny him. He’s never wanted to be wrong so badly in his life. Unjust as it is, a smile curls across his lips and his eyes burn as they’ve never burned while he tries to keep them from falling. He adjusts his grip on the phone and shifts on his feet, one hand moving to the table to support himself. He feels as though his legs are moments from giving out. 

“I might be getting married next spring, yes,” Erik’s voice comes, and Charles wants to scream. The bastard doesn’t even sound happy about it, Christ, he doesn’t even sound glad. His tone matches the way one might make a mundane observation --  _ those are his shoes, the clouds are white, I might be getting married next spring. _

Charles feels himself choking on all of his questions. His head hurts and his throat is closing and his eyes are burning. He feels anger and frustration in his chest searing him like he’s never felt before and his hand grips the phone like a lifeline. It’s another long moment of Charles breathing, trying to decipher what he should say. What he could say. 

“You never said anything,” Charles forces out with a cruel smile on his lips. The cruelty isn’t for Erik.

“We’ve been… off and on for a few years,” Erik answers almost sheepishly, and Charles feels more anger heavy in his chest that he chooses now to feel shame about this. Not when he locked Charles’ door or when he pulled him into the water or fed him cherries in the shade or let Charles into his mind. 

Charles finds himself nodding. There isn’t anyone around to see him nod, but he does it. He raises his eyebrows as if to tell himself ‘ _ what did you expect? _ ’

“That’s wonderful news,” he says because it is. Good for Erik, he thinks bitterly. The words cut his tongue as they come out. 

He hears a click and his father’s voice comes onto the line. “Erik?” He asks, and Charles’ mother’s voice joins his. 

Listening to them, the burning emotion he’d felt turns him numb. Cold like being held by strong arms in the river at night.

Erik tells them of his engagement and Charles stares at the wall, holding the receiver still tightly in his hand. He feels as if at any moment he might boil over. 

“Mom,” Charles hears in the background, “let Charles talk to him.”

“Right, right!” She says, “We’ll let you talk to Charles, love, congratulations.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Xavier, and you, too, Professor.” 

Charles hears the line click dead, and he wilts. This is real. Everything was perfect and now it’s just… gone. “You’ve been busy, then?” Charles asks mildly. 

“Things are different,” Erik tells him and it’s the first thing that actually sounds like Erik means it. 

“‘I exist --’” Charles starts, and his voice breaks. He shakes his head, then starts again. “‘I exist as I am, and that is enough’.”

“‘If no other in the world be aware I sit content’,” Erik continues, his voice suddenly much more quiet than it had been., “‘And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait’.” There’s a lull in his words, and Charles wishes so badly to be touched by him, to be held once more. 

“I remember,” Erik tells him, his voice like a promise, “ _ everything. _ ”

After the phone is put back where it belongs, Charles wanders over to a pair of french doors and opens one up. The snow is coming down in delicate flakes, building upon the white blanket that already covers their property. His tears burn as they slide over his cold skin and drip off his chin. 

He thinks about his life. 

“Charles,” it’s Raven’s voice behind him, and the first time he doesn’t move. He is utterly still, a statue in the snow until his fingers and hands go as numb as his heart feels. “Charles,” she calls again, and he finally looks over his shoulder. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
